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COLLEGE AND STATE 
VOLUME ONE 


2340 S STREET N W 


26th February 1924 
Dear sirs: 


I am in receipt of your letter of February 
18th, and it seems to me the work you propose doing 
in bringing out Mr,Wilson's public papers in a single 
adequate publication is most important, 

At my request, Mr,Ray Stannard Baker and Prof, 
Wm,E,Dodd have assumed the task of bringing together 
Mr,Wilson's messages to the Congress, international 
notes, important public addresses, statements, and 
Other public papers; in short, all the important 
public documents written by him, with brief explan~ 
atory notes where necessary, 

This is the only authorized edition of Mr, 
Wilson's public utterances, and I have asked the 
editors to present them in a form to make them of 
the utmost permanent value to the general reading 
public as well as to historians and students of 
government, 


Sincerely yours, AS - 
Coon DOW y Ne de 
(Mrs, Woodrow Wilson), 
Harper & Brothers, 


49 East 33d Street, 
New York, N. Y, 


THE ‘LIBRARY 
OF THE 
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Educational, Literary and Political 
Papers (1875-1913) 


BY 


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The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson 
Authorised Edition 


COLLEGE AND STATE 


Educational, Literary and Political 
Papers (1875-1913) 


BY 


WOODROW WILSON 


EDITED BY 
RAY STANNARD BAKER ano WILLIAM E. DODD 


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IN TWO VOLUMES 


VOLUME I 


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COLLEGE AND STATE 


Copyright, 1925 
By Edith Bolling Wilson 
Printed in the U. S. A. 
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PREFACE 


“THe PuBiic Papers OF WoopROow WILSON” is the 
authorized collection, in six volumes, of the addresses, 
messages and other writings of President Wilson. 

The first two volumes, here presented, cover the pre- 
paratory period of ‘‘College and State,” from the earli- 
est published writing, an essay on “Prince Bismarck,” 
signed Atticus, prepared while Mr. Wilson was a soph- 
omore at Princeton, to March 4, 1913, when he be- 
came President of the United States. None of these 
papers is included in any of Mr. Wilson’s published 
books. The other four volumes of the series will con- 
tain Mr. Wilson’s messages to Congress, and other 
great public papers of the Presidency, including the 
more important addresses, especially those made in 
Europe, and significant published letters. 

For the preparation of this work Mrs. Woodrow 
Wilson placed at the disposal of the present editors all 
of the original manuscripts, proofs, and pamphlets, so 
far as they exist, of Mr. Wilson’s addresses and mes- 
sages: and others have been gathered from periodicals, 
from reports of meetings where he was a speaker, or 
from congressional or other documents preserved in 
the Library of Congress or in the Library of Prince- 
ton University. Although Mr. Wilson, during all these 
early years, was a busy college professor or president, 
and the author of a number of scholarly books, his out- 
put of articles and addresses was remarkably extensive 
and of the highest quality. Here he laid his intellectual 
foundations; here he expressed the principles and de- 
veloped the policies which he was to apply in later years 
to the practical problems of the nation and of the 
world. The man was made intellectually when he en- 


PREFACE 


tered the Presidency: it is, indeed, the making of Wood- 
row Wilson that is the subject of these first two vol- 
umes. 

But there is here an embarrassment of riches: such 
a wealth of these early writings and addresses that the 
editors, while able to include a large proportion of 
them, have still been forced to select. Mr. Wilson’s 
three great interests were politics or government, edu- 
cation, religion. We have endeavored to include all 
of the most important and interpretive documents upon 
these subjects. Where he made many speeches upon 
topics in which he was deeply engaged, such as the pre- 
ceptorial system at Princeton, or the campaign issues in 
New Jersey, we have chosen those which best and most 
completely exhibit his entire thought. To include all 
of the writings and addresses upon these subjects would 
needlessly overload a work of this kind. We have pre- 
sented nearly all of his papers upon those thinkers and 
leaders who most influenced his thought and career, ex- 
cept those essays (as on Burke and Bagehot) which are 
already in Mr. Wilson’s published books. ‘These in- 
clude the significant papers on Pitt, Bright, and Glad- 
stone; Washington, Jefferson, Lee, Lincoln and Cleve- 
land. 

For the painstaking student who wishes to inquire 
further into Mr. Wilson’s production, an exploration 
which will yield much of powerful or felicitous expres- 
sion, we have appended a bibliography, originally made 
under the supervision of the Princeton University Li- 
brary, corrected and brought up to date by Howard 
Seavoy Leach, librarian of Lehigh University. The 
earlier parts of this bibliography were examined by 
President Wilson personally. By a comparison of the 
papers published in these volumes with the bibliography, 
the student will easily discover what has been omitted. 
A comprehensive index is also provided, to enable the 
reader to find quickly the various utterances of Presi- 
dent Wilson upon any given subject. 


vil 


PREFACE 


The editors wish to express their particular thanks 
to Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, at whose suggestion and re- 
quest this work has been undertaken, and to A. R. Boyd 
and W. J. Ashley of the Library of Congress for their 
active assistance in the locating and photostating of 
material under their charge; James Thayer Gerould of 
the Princeton University Library, and Howard Seavoy 
Leach for similar services; Cyrus McCormick of Chi- 
cago for placing at our disposal certain papers which 
might otherwise have escaped attention; and Professor 
J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton of the University of North 
Carolina and Professor Alfred P. James of the Uni- 
versity of Pittsburgh for assistance in securing material 
that came to their attention. 


vii 


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INTRODUCTION 


Wooprow WILSON was born in Staunton, Virginia, 
on December 28, 1856. His family moved to Augusta, 
Georgia, the next year and, consequently, the early 
youth of the later President was spent in the beautiful 
old Southern town in the midst of the cotton belt. After 
the civil war Dr. Joseph Ruggles Wilson, the father, 
moved to Columbia, South Carolina, to become pro- 
fessor of theology in the school made famous by James 
H. Thornwell, one of the greatest preachers of his 
time. But Columbia and Augusta were different only 
in the intensity of their devotion to the cause of the 
South in the war between the sections. 

The schools that gave Wilson his early training were 
conducted by masters engaged for their learning in the 
classics and paid out of the pockets of the patrons. 
Wilson was never in a public school. But the principal 
instructor of young Woodrow was Doctor Wilson him- 
self, a master of English form and diction, as one notes 
from the sermons that have come down to us. Out of 
this environment of the old and broken South, of in- 
fluential Presbyterian preachers and pedagogues of the 
old style, young Wilson was sent to Davidson College, 
North Carolina, literally a school of the prophets for 
the Presbyterian Church of the South, in the autumn of 
1874. [here he remained the better part of a year. 
In September, 1875, he went to Princeton, where he re- 
ceived the regular four years’ college course of the 
time, mainly classical in its content. 

From Princeton he went to the University of Vir- 
ginia to “‘take law” under the greatest of all Southern 
teachers of that subject, Dr. John B. Minor. ‘There 
Wilson finished his formal legal training and in 1882 


1X 


INTRODUCTION 


he began the practice of his profession in Atlanta. Al- 
ready the young man had shown his interest in and 
fitness for public life, and to so impatient a youth law 
seemed tedious and slow. He abandoned the profes- 
sion and renewed his studies at the new Johns Hopkins 
University in the autumn of 1882. During the suc- 
ceeding eight years he was a student and a teacher, 
occupying positions in the faculties of Johns Hopkins, 
Bryn Mawr, and Wesleyan universities. In September, 
1890, he became professor of jurisprudence in Prince- 
ton. There he and his wife, Ellen Axson, of Savannah, 
Georgia, a woman of similar Southern charm and back- 
ground as her husband, made their home for the next 
twenty years, a remarkable home, simple, hospitable, 
and a center of intellectual and social interests where 
all the connections were ever at ease. From 1890 to 
1910, Wilson remained at Princeton, first as a profes- 
sor and then as president and professor for eight years; 
and two years as Governor of New Jersey brought him 
to the Presidency on March 4, 1913. These years of 
keen and active intellectual life made Mr. Wilson 
known to the country; they were the years of his great 
apprenticeship. 

The output of these preparatory years was a body 
of literary material of great interest to any student of 
American history and institutions. A popular history 
of the United States and a life of George Washington 
were the most important, perhaps, though his little 
manual, Division and Reunion, was of great value in 
the way of a better interpretation of the national con- 
flict about slavery. There were other books—Congres- 
sional Government, The State, Mere Literature, An 
Old Master and Other Essays, and Constitutional Gov- 
ernment in the United States—which attest the industry 
and range of interest of their author, and a vast flow 
of articles and addresses not now accessible to the pub- 
lic. It is the purpose of the first two of these volumes 
of ‘“The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson,” now of- 


x 


INTRODUCTION 


fered to the public, to present the best of these early 
writings, addresses and messages in attractive and con- 
venient form. 

When scanned carefully these papers will, we think, 
illustrate admirably the growth of Woodrow Wilson 
as a thinker and indicate the range and character of 
his major interests. In one of the earliest statements 
we note a strong characteristic of the man: 


It is not my purpose to represent any particular interest; no man 
with his senses about him would recommend perfect freedom of 
trade; protection is nothing more than a bounty and bounties enable 
manufacturers to build up interests; [that may have been permissible 
in times of war] but now that peace has come, the South will insist 
upon having the fruits of peace.” 


There was in this no dogmatic adherence to a doc- 
trine, notwithstanding he and his section were identi- 
fied with the ideal and the interest of free trade. Of 
similar tendency was his advocacy of a closer relation 
between the Executive and Congress in the national 
government. He was one of the first of American pub- 
licists to point out the weakness of the system of checks 
and balances so perfectly illustrated in the conduct of 
Congress and Presidents. His first article that secured 
a wide reading began very much as a similar study of 
our government might begin to-day: 


Our patriotism seems of late to have been exchanging its wonted 
tone of confident hope for one of desponding solicitude. Anxiety 
about the future of our institutions seems to be daily becoming 
stronger in the minds of thoughtful Americans. . . . Both State and 
National legislatures are looked upon with nervous suspicion, and 
we hail an adjournment of congress as a temporary immunity from 
danger. 


In both of the statements from which the above quo- 
tations are taken there appears the strong note of in- 


* Report of the Tariff Commission, 47th Cong., 2d Session, House Mis- 
cellaneous Documents, Vol. 3, pp. 1294-1297. September 22, 1882. 
? International Review, August, 1879. 


x1 


INTRODUCTION 


terest in public questions. Of similar but more historic 
importance is the following striking summing up of the 
career and personality of Grover Cleveland, whom Wil- 
son knew rather intimately and admired greatly: 


We need not pretend to know what history shall say of Mr. 
Cleveland; we need not pretend that we can draw any common 
judgment of the man from the confused cries that now ring every- 
where from friend and foe. We know only that he has played a 
great part; that his greatness is authenticated by the passion of love 
and hatred he has stirred up; that no such great personality has ap- 
peared in our politics since Lincoln; and that, either greater or less, 
his personality is his own, unique in the varied history of our govern- 
ment. He has made policies and altered parties after the fashion of 
an earlier age in our history, and the men who assess his fame in 
the future will be no partisans, but men who love candor, courage, 
honesty, strength, unshaken capacity, and high purpose such as his.” 


These quotations show the direction of Wilson’s 
thought during the whole of his life, but as he rose to 
greater influence in the administration and guidance of 
Princeton, he tended to abandon political themes for 
education, education, to be sure, as a means of a better 
social and political order. When, therefore, the old 
college which he had known as a student was formally 
converted into a university and he was asked to take 
part in the proceedings, he made elaborate preparations 
and spoke to a vast audience on October 21, 1896, an 
audience of distinguished alumni and friends of the 
new university: 


I have had sight of the perfect place of learning in my thought: 
a free place, and a various, where no man can be and not know with 
how great a destiny knowledge had come into the world—itself a 
little world; but not perplexed, living with a singleness of aim not 
known without; the home of sagacious men, hard-headed and with a 
will to know, debaters of the world’s questions every day and used 
to the rough ways of democracy; and yet a place removed—calm 
science seated there, recluse, ascetic like a nun, not knowing that the 
world passes, not caring, if the truth but come in answer to her 
prayer; and Literature, walking within her open doors, in quiet 
chambers, with men of olden time, storied walls about her, and calm 


* The Atlantic Monthly, March, 1897. 


XI1L 


INTRODUCTION 


voices infinitely sweet; a place where ideals are kept in heart in an 
air they can breathe; but no fool’s paradise. A place where to hear 
the truth about the past and hold debate about the affairs of the 
present, with knowledge and without passion; like the world in 
having all men’s life at heart, a place for men and all that concerns 
them; but unlike the world in its self-possession, its thorough way 
of talk, its care to know more than the moment brings to light; 
slow to take excitement, its air pure and wholesome with a breath 
of faith; every eye within it bright in the clear day and quick to 
look toward heaven for the confirmation of its hope. Who shall 
show us the way to this place?” 


This was the ideal, an ideal college life, devotion to 
learning and the public interest, never realized any- 
where on earth. But Wilson was nothing if not an 
idealist. As the years passed at Princeton and the pro- 
fessor of jurisprudence came to be recognized by his 
fellows, and by the trustees as well, as the foremost 
teacher of his subject perhaps in the country, there was 
an insistent demand that he be made president to suc- 
ceed Doctor Patton, who retired in June, 1902. Wil- 
son was chosen and forthwith he began the campaign 
of education that made Princeton a subject of discus- 
sion wherever educators were assembled. He began 
his fateful career as president of Princeton University 
with zeal and energy. Before the end of December, 
1902, he had formulated his first measure of reform. 
It was the tutorial system: 


Gentlemen, if we could get a body of such tutors at Princeton we 
could transform the place from a place where there are youngsters 
doing tasks to a place where there are men doing thinking, men 
who are conversing about the things of thought, men who are 
eager and interested in the things of thought.’ 


Seven short years followed. Wilson gathered mil- 
lions of dollars for his new ventures in education; he 
set up the preceptorial system and more than doubled 

* Princeton Sesquicentennial, October 21, 1896. 

*From his first important speech to the Eastern alumni of Princeton, 
New York, December 9, 1902. In Princeton Alumni Weekly, December 
13, 1902. 

xili 


INTRODUCTION 


the number of instructors; and finally he sought to 
bring all the classmen and the clubs that were based on 
ideas of social separateness into common association. 
On this hard proposition of democracy and co-opera- 
tion he failed. Slowly the students learned to resist 
him. ‘Then some professors resented his growing pres- 
tige and sweeping control of all the life of the place. 
And finally the alumni reached a state of divided alle- 
giance which threatened his sources of financial sup- 
plies. But before 1910 his influence and his career at 
Princeton had become known throughout the country. 
Other teachers and leaders in the field of education 
were profoundly influenced, albeit little official sympa- 
thy was expressed. The bearings of his work were 
tending more and more toward social and political is- 
sues; and it was clear that he was reapproaching his 
earlier realm of thought—politics. 

In plain realization of this tendency of his life he 
said at the University of North Carolina on the occa- 
sion of the celebration of the anniversary of the birth 


of Robert E. Lee: 


This man was not great because he was born of a soldier and bred 
in a school of soldiers, but because, of whomsoever he may have been 
born, howsoever he was bred, he was a man who saw his duty, who 
conceived it in high terms, and who spent himself, not upon his own 
ambitions, but in the duty that lay before him. . . . Now, what does 
it mean that General Lee is accepted as a national hero? It means 
simply this delightful thing, that there are no sections in this country 
any more; that we are a nation and are proud of all the great 
heroes whom the great processes of our national life have elevated 
into conspicuous places of fame. . . . I spoke just now in disparage- 
ment of the vocation of an orator. I wish there were some great 
orator who could go about and make men drunk with this spirit of 
self-sacrifice. I wish there were some man whose tongue might 
every day carry abroad the golden accents of that creative age in 
which we were born a nation; accents which would ring like tones 
of reassurance around the whole circle of the globe, so that America 
might again have the distinction of showing men the way, the certain 
way, of achievement and of confident hope.’ 


* The Journal of Social Forces, March, 1924. 
xiv 


INTRODUCTION 


In these last lines one readily notes the prophecy of 
his own future. That some one might again show the 
way, the way of achievement and of hope. Had he not 
closed his famous address to his Princeton friends in 
1896 with this fond hope as applied to the realm of 
education? Now it is the way of the whole world upon 
which the true orator and leader of men would cast 
his helpful light. He was hardly through with the task 
in North Carolina and the South before we find him 
in Chicago on the occasion of the celebration of the 
hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lin- 
coln, declaring before a distinguished Northern audi- 


ence: 


The most valuable thing about Mr. Lincoln was that in the midst 
of the strain of war, in the midst of the crash of arms, he could 
sit quietly in his room and enjoy a book that led his thoughts off 
from everything American; could wander in fields of dreams, while 
every other man was hot with the immediate contest. Always set 
your faith in a man who can withdraw himself, because only the 
man who can withdraw himself can see the stage; only the man who 
can withdraw himself can see affairs as they are. 

And so the lesson of this day is faith in the common product of 
the nation; the lesson of this day is [that] the future as well as the 
past leadership of men, wise men, has come from the people. We 
should not be Americans deserving to call ourselves the fellow- 
countrymen of Lincoln if we did not feel the compulsion that his 
example lays upon us—the compulsion not to heed him merely but 
to look to our own duty, to live every day as if that were the day 
upon which America was to be reborn and remade.’ 


In these addresses he is not so much the historian as 
he had been in his earlier writings; he is no longer the 
leader of a reform movement in an American univer- 
sity. He is making his appeal to men everywhere to 
remake their country and vaguely conscious of that 
destiny which beckons him first to the Governorship of 
New Jersey, then to the Presidency of the United 
States, and finally to that greater stage of the modern 

* Abraham Lincoln, The Tribute of a Century, edited by Nathan Wil- 


liam MacChesney, pp. 4-30. 
XV 


INTRODUCTION 


world, Paris, whence he was to return a broken, if not a 
disillusioned, man. In the midst of these growing in- 
terests he never ceased to take an active part in the reli- 
gious problems and development of the country, as 
the following excerpt from one of his most famous 
speeches shows: 

“T hope that the last thing I will ever be capable of will be cast- 
ing a shadow on the church, and yet the churches—the Protestant 
churches, at least—have dissociated themselves from the people. 


They serve the classes, not the masses. ‘They serve certain visible, 
uplifted strata and ignore the men whose need is dire.” * 


Thus, even in this first installment of the papers of 
Woodrow Wilson, it appears clearly enough that he 
was interested in all the greater things that were to 
come before him as President, interested in and vaguely 
conscious of the causes and events that were to make 
of his life one of the climaxes and one of the tragedies 
of modern history. In the selections we have made, 
the purpose has been to indicate as clearly as we might 
the growth of the intellectual man, the bearings of the 
earlier career, and the tendency in all toward social 
and political change, even revolution. In the succeed- 
ing volumes we shall hope to present the better part 
of all those great utterances of the President in Wash- 
ington and the liberal leader at Paris which mankind 
is not apt to forget. 


*Address to Pittsburgh Alumni, April 16, 1910, published in The 
Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, April 17, 1910. 


CONTENTS 


PRINCE BISMARCK De arial renee 
Mr. Wilson’s first article, written when he was 
twenty-one years old, a sophomore at Princeton. 
Signed ‘“‘Atticus.” From the Nassau Literary Maga- 
zine, November, 1877, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 118-127. _ 


WILLIAM EarL CHATHAM Rs 
Prize Essay. Signed “Thomas W. Wilson, "79, of 
N.C.” From the Nassau Literary Mebacine Octo- 
ber, 1878, Vol. 34, pp. 99-105. 


CABINET GOVERNMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 


Written while Wilson was a senior at Princeton and 
published in the International Review, August, 
1879, Vol. 6, pp. 146-163. It is a curious fact, re- 

called during the later years of Wilson’s life, that 
Henry Cabot Lodge was editor of the International 
Review and thus became the publisher of the future 
President’s first article. 


JoHN BricHT : + Whale Me 
An oration Bere Seah, th Teco Society of 
the University of Virginia and published in the Unz- 
versity of Virginia Magazine, March, 1880, Vol. 
19, pp. 354-370. Unsigned. Wilson was then a post- 
graduate student. 


THE Roman CaTHOLIc CHURCH IN AMERICA 


Woodrow Wilson on the negative of a debate on the 
query, Is the Roman Catholic element in the United 
States a menace to American Institutions? The Uni- 
versity of Virginia Magazine, April, 1880, Vol. 19, 
Pp. 448-450. 

Mr. GLADSTONE: A CHARACTER SKETCH ... . 


This article, signed “Atticus,” was published in the 
University of Virginia Magazine, April, 1880, Vol. 
19, pp. 401-426. On the preceding page of the 
magazine, which gives the table of contents, “by 
Woodrow Wilson” is inserted opposite the title “Mr. 
Gladstone: Character Sketch.” 


XVii 


PAGE 


II 


19 


43 


60 


63 


CONTENTS 


First STATEMENT ON THE TARIFF QUESTION 

Testimony of ‘Mr. Woodrow Wilson of Atlanta’’ be- 
fore the Tariff Commission, Atlanta session, Septem- 
ber 22, 1882. Mr. Wilson was then practicing law 
in Atlanta. 

Report of the Tariff Commission, Vol. 2, pp. 1294- 
1297; 47th Congress, 2d Session, House Miscella- 
neous Documents, Vol. 3. 


CoMMITTEE OR CABINET GOVERNMENT? . RAVE 
Written while Mr. Wilson was a student at Johns 
Hopkins. The Overland Monthly, January, 1884, 
Series 2, Vol. 3, pp. 17-33. 


THE STuDY OF ADMINISTRATION stil Balee ; 
Written while Mr. Wilson was a teacher at Beye 
Mawr. From the Political Science Quarterly, June, 
1887, Vol. 2, pp. 197-222. 


Bryce’s “AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH” 
A review of Jamcs Bryce’s The American Common- 
wealth in the Political Science Quarterly, March, 
1889, Vol. 4, pp. 153-169. Written while Mr. Wil- 
son was teaching at Wesleyan College. 


THE ONE-HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE INAUGU- 
RATION OF GEORGE WASHINGTON 
Address delivered April 30, 1889 (clea not esis 
From original manuscript in Mr. Wilson’s hand- 
writing: in Mrs. Wilson’s possession. 


A SysTEM OF PoLiTICAL SCIENCE AND CONSTITUTIONAL 

Law Pak et iiite tka Te eee : vee 
A review of Political Science and Comparative Con- 
stitutional Law by John W. Burgess. From the 4t- 
lantic Monthly, May, 1891, Vol. 67, pp. 694-699. 
Written during Mr. Wilson’s first year at Princeton 
as a professor. 


Mr. CLEVELAND’s CABINET . . ay 
The Review of Reviews (Aeuets: Aoeh 1893, 
Vol. 7, pp. 286-297. 


XVili 


PAGE 


89 


95 


130 


159 


1'79 


187 


198 


CONTENTS 


SHOULD AN ANTECEDENT LIBERAL EpucATION Be RE- 
QUIRED OF STUDENTS IN Law, MeEpDICINE AND 
THEOLOGY? 


World’s Fair, Chien Peer International Congress 
of Education. Wilson’s answer to the query, deliv- 
ered July 26, 1893. 

From the Proceedings of the International Congress 
of Education of the World’s Columbian Exposition. 
New York, 1894, pp. 112-117. 


THE LEGAL EpucATION OF UNDERGRADUATES P 
Address before the American Bar Association, Sara- 
toga Springs, August 23, 1894. ‘“Iaken from the 
Report of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting, pp. 439- 
451. Philadelphia, 1894. 


UNIVERSITY TRAINING AND CITIZENSHIP 


From The Forum, September, 1894, Vol. 18, pp. a 
116. Walter H. Page was then editor of The Forum. 


PRINCETON IN THE NATION’S SERVICE 


From The Forum, December, 1896, Vol. 22, pp. oe 
466. An oration delivered at the Princeton Sesqui- 
centennial celebration, October 21, 1896. 


Mr. CLEVELAND AS PRESIDENT . 


From the Atlantic Monthly, March, rape. Vol. ay 
pp. 289-300. Walter H. Page was then editor of 
the Atlantic Monthly. 


THE MAKING OF THE NATION . 
From the Atlantic Monthly, fie ENG) voll 80, 
pp. I-14. 


LEADERLESS GOVERNMENT . 


Address before the Virginia State Bar Peover: 
August 4, 1897. James E. Goode Printing Company, 
Richmond, 1897. 


THE PurITAN 
Speech before na Ne ew eid Saeiete ii Ne York 
City, December 22, 1900. Proceedings printed by 
William Green, New York, 1'900, pp. 39-49. 


xix 


PAGE 


223 


232 


246 


259 


286 


310 


336 


360 


CONTENTS 


THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE SOUTHERN STATES 

ee the Atlantic Monthly, January, 1901, Vol. 87, 
I-15. 

a este AND EFFICIENCY 
From the Atlantic Monthly, Nie I9QOI, Vol. By, 
pp. 289-299. 

THE IDEALS OF AMERICA 
From the Atlantic Monthly, Deh 1902, Vol. 
90, pp. 721-734. This article appeared the first year 
Mr. Wilson was president of Princeton. 

PRINCETON FOR THE NATION’S SERVICE 
Inaugural Address as president of Prides ae 
versity, October 25, 1902. From the Princeton 
Alumni Weekly, November 1, 1902, Vol. 3, No. 6, 
pp. 89-98. 


PRINCETON IDEALS . 
Delivered at Princeton dinner at FAG Waldorf. Agus 
December 9, 1902. From the Princeton Alumni 
W eekly, December 13, 1902, Vol. 3, pp. 199-204. 
Reported stenographically and corrected by Mr. 
Wilson. 


THE YOUNG PEOPLE AND THE CHURCH . 

An Address delivered before the Fortieth neal 
Convention of the Pennsylvania State Sabbath-school 
Association at Pittsburgh, October 13, 1904. The 
Sunday School Times Co., Philadelphia, 1905. 

‘THE PRINCETON Parceer aan SYSTEM 
From The Independent, August 3, 1905, Va a 
Pp. 239-240. 

THE PRECEPTORIAL SYSTEM We 
Address before the Western ES K Banca 
Clubs at Cleveland, Ohio, May 19, 1906. From the 
Princeton Alumni Weekly, June 2, 1906, Vol. 6, 
pp. 651-655. 

REPORT ON THE SOCIAL Co-ORDINATION OF THE UNT- 

VERSITY ' : ' 
Submitted to the trustees ee iPeinteroh Uniketaen 
June 10, 1907. From Princeton Alumni Weekly, 
June 12, 1907, Vol. 7, pp. 606-615. 


xx 


PAGE 


368 


396 


416 


443 


462 


474 


487 


491 


499 


COLLEGE AND STATE 


PRINCE BISMARCK 


MR. WILSON’S FIRST ARTICLE, WRITTEN WHEN TWENTY- 
ONE YEARS OLD, A SOPHOMORE AT PRINCETON, 
SIGNED ‘‘ATTICUS.”’ FROM THE “‘NASSAU LITERARY 
MAGAZINE,’ NOVEMBER, 1877, VOL. XXXIII, NO. 2; 
PP. 118-127. 


EW centuries seem to have been more fruitful in 

crises, in revolutions and counter-revolutions, in 
the establishment, convulsion, and overthrow of em- 
pires and kingdoms than our own. From the period 
upon the teeming pages of whose history falls the 
glitter of the first and great Napoleon’s sword to that 
which witnessed the sudden downfall of the third 
Napoleon, innovation and revolution have been the 
rule rather than the exception in Europe. With Thiers 
passed away the last of those illustrious men who 
figured amid the memorable events which crowded upon 
one another in rapid succession after the great revolu- 
tion and its attending convulsions. With the appear- 
ance of Bismarck upon the political stage began the 
rule of a new line of statesmen. Stern Time had super- 
seded Thiers. Upon his will had hung the destinies of 
France. He had seen his country at the zenith of her 
glory; he lived to see her in deepest degradation at 
the feet of Bismarck. He lingered only long enough to 
see his country once more recover some of her wonted 
energy and then reluctantly made way for a younger 
generation of statesmen. 

The death of Thiers has naturally led us to think of 
those whom he has left behind him in the field of Euro- 
pean politics. And upon the character and life of Bis- 
marck, now the foremost figure of Europe, we would 

I 


2 COLLEGE AND STATE 


dwell for a little. We may, from the vantage ground 
of disinterested observation, be able, in the light of the 
eventful sixty-two years of his life, to estimate his merits 
without the hatred of the Austrian, the fear-begotten 
bitterness of the Frenchman, or the prejudice of the 
Englishman, to warp our judgment. 

Perhaps nothing would have appeared more improb- 
able to the ordinary observer of thirty-five years ago 
than that the unpromising young aristocrat, the young 
man only now and then exchanging the pleasures of the 
hunting field and the drinking-bout for the moody 
perusal of miscellaneous literature and abstruse philoso- 
phy, the young Bismarck, would before his sixtieth year 
make himself the virtual master of Europe. In the 
youthful Bismarck, describing in frequent and character- 
istic letters to his sister, “the farce of shooting the 
fox,’ which he daily performed in company with his old 
and then somewhat simple-minded father, there ap- 
peared few indications of that power of intellect and 
that force of purpose which characterize his later man- 
hood. Occasionally, indeed, he lets fall some expression 
of discontent at the narrowness of his circle of vision 
and the petty character of the daily events of his life; 
but there were, so far as we can learn, no croppings out 
of that genius now so greatly feared and so justly ad- 
mired. He seemed, unlike his ancestors, destined to 
pass his life in the humble position of a country squire, 
until in 1847 he was called upon to take his place as a 
representative in his provincial Diet. 

The notable year 1848 was the first year of Bis- 
marck’s public life. Every one is familiar with the 
revolutions which then convulsed the eastern portion 
of Europe; every one remembers with what startling 
rapidity the revolutionary spirit spread into every cor- 
ner of Europe. We can easily conceive that it was a 
time when every patriotic Prussian must have been 
filled with the gravest apprehensions with regard to his 
country’s future, France seemed to weather the storm 


COLLEGE AND STATE 3 


with unsapped strength and undiminished resources, 
while the apparent success of the revolution made 
every sovereign of Europe tremble on his throne. Rus- 
sia was then little less than Dictatress of Europe. 
Austria was supreme in the councils of the Confedera- 
tion and seemed likely to hold Prussia in perpetual sub- 
ordination, and the safety of Prussia, which seemed 
to the more conservative threatened by the somewhat 
revolutionary tendencies of the Prussian Liberals, ap- 
parently depended upon the continuance of this sub- 
ordination. Prussia was thus surrounded by powerful 
states of no very friendly character at the same time 
that she found herself obliged to fight a domestic enemy 
in the shape of radicalism. Entering public life at 
such a time and under such circumstances, Bismarck, 
with his aristocratic and monarchical sympathies, 
naturally saw only the dangers of what he regarded 
as a menacing spirit of democracy, and we find him 
standing up in the Prussian Assembly and, even after 
the humiliation of Olmutz, boldly advocating Prussian 
subserviency to the house of Hapsburg. He looked 
with deep apprehension at the alarming spread of revo- 
lutionary principles and was naturally convinced that a 
close alliance with Austria was the only means by which 
these principles could be successfully combated. Seeing 
the many dangers which threatened the interests of the 
Confederation, he felt that Austrian domination alone 
could fend off these dangers from Germany and saw 
nothing but frivolity and “revolutionary enterprise”’ in 
all schemes for the deliverance of Schleswig-Holstein. 
But eight years at Frankfort in the midst of all kinds 
of petty, partisan struggles and contemptible efforts to 
secure influence by improper means, revealed to Bis- 
marck the “utter nullity” of the German Confederation 
and taught him to regard with hatred and distrust the 
Austria of whose power he had so lately been the eager 
defender. By affording him an insight into the affairs 
of Germany and by revealing to him the extent of 


4 COLLEGE AND STATE 


Austria’s power and the direction in which it was all 
exerted, his stay at Frankfort proved eminently useful 
to Bismarck. It imparted to his views of European 
relations and of the possibilities of Prussia that breadth 
and grasp which have ever since characterized them. 
Brsmarck’s early political career was such as to render 
him peculiarly fit for that authority with which he was 
destined to be invested, and it was well for Prussia 
that when, in 1862, a crisis of supreme importance 
came she could avail herself of the services of Bis- 
marck’s clear eye and trained hand. The Crimean war 
and the international complications which sprung from 
it had caused the opening of a widening breach be- 
tween Russia and Austria. Napoleon was plotting 
against Austria for the purpose of promoting Italian 
unity and, in his eagerness for the friendship of Russia, 
was unconsciously playing into the hands of Gort- 
schakoff. The Prussian nation was deeply agitated by 
the fierce contention of parties and the angry antago- 
nism of king and parliament, at the same time that the 
French papers seemed eager to thrust a splendid destiny 
upon Prussia by loudly calling upon her to unify and 
thus save Germany. Bismarck seems to have quickly 
and skilfully availed himself of all the golden oppor- 
tunities which, amid such confusion of interests, offered 
themselves for the aggrandizement of Prussia. Be- 
yond all opposition in parliament and all antagonism in 
the king’s closet, he seems to have seen some prospect 
of an immediate realization of those hopes which he 
had so long cherished with reference to the increase of 
Prussian influence and the ultimate humiliation of Aus- 
tria. He probably felt that in his own powers lay many 
bright possibilities; and, acting with his usual decision 
and energy he commenced with a firm and skilled hand 
to steadily lay the foundations of Prussia’s future power 
and greatness. The late Prussian plenipotentiary to 
the Federal Diet was not long in making himself dic- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 5 


tator of Europe; the keen diplomatist soon proved him- 
self the master-statesman. 

Events called into action the man from whose will 
so many events have sprung. In 1862, when every 
rumor indicated a close alliance between Russia, Prussia, 
and France, and every circumstance seemed to be call- 
ing upon Prussia for immediate and energetic action, 
William had need to call into his counsels a vigorous 
mind, and it did not long remain doubtful to whom the 
position of chief adviser belonged by right of states- 
manlike genius. Bismarck’s character and commanding 
talents rendered him a necessity to the king. In his 
new position, which proved to be the most responsible 
in Europe, he acted with a boldness and energy com- 
bined with foresight and prudence which have made him 
the most prominent figure in modern history. To sketch 
his career since 1862 would be to recapitulate the his- 
tory of Europe for the last fifteen years and such a 
sketch cannot be attempted here. It will be our aim 
simply to delineate with all possible care his mental and 
moral character. 

We can form no just conception of Bismarck’s capaci- 
ties as a statesman by comparing him with any of those 
great English statesmen to whom we have been wont 
to accord a large place in our notice and admiration, or 
with any of those honored men and able statesmen who 
brought our republic in safety and honor through the 
storms of her early existence. Neither those talents so 
necessary to the English statesman as a leader of Parlia- 
ment nor those peculiar gifts always to be found in 
the guide of popular opinion and guard of popular 
institutions are necessary to the Prussian statesman. All 
the energies of the English or American statesman must 
be spent in governing great popular assemblies, in 
manipulating parties, in directing and controlling 
popular opinion. The Prussian statesman, on the 
other hand, must exert all his powers in rendering him- 
self supreme in the royal closet; his power does not 


6 COLLEGE AND STATE 


depend upon popular assemblies whose favor he must 
win and whose support he must command, but rests 
entirely with his royal master; he is comparatively inde- 
pendent of party relations and ties. Besides great in- 
tellect, the English statesman must have eloquence and 
tact; in the Prussian statesman eloquence and tact are 
nothing unless accompanied by marked administrative 
and diplomatic talents and a controlling influence over 
the royal mind. The triumphs of the English statesman 
are gained upon the floor of parliament; those of the 
Prussian statesman are won in the cabinet of his King. 
The powers of the English statesman are apt to be 
dwarfed in being so constantly exercised for the acquire- 
ment of nothing more than skill in dialectic fence; in- 
trigue is apt to bemean the powers and sully the char- 
acter of the Prussian statesman. For all the officers of 
the Prussian ministry are directly responsible to the 
king alone, and the prime minister, exercising no direct 
supervision over them, must control his subordinates 
through the king, their common master. And, while 
many a triumph over external difficulties and opponents, 
many a master-stroke of policy, and many a victory in 
war have all combined to attest the pre-eminence of 
his genius, Bismarck’s character is not altogether free 
from the stain which intrigue invariably brings. In 
his dealings with the diplomatic world or even with 
his royal master he has not always proved himself 
above deceit. But still he may justly be regarded as a 
grand type of his class of statesmen—men of inde- 
pendent conviction, full of self-trust, and themselves 
the spirit of their country’s institutions. In Bismarck 
are united the moral force of Cromwell and the political 
shrewdness of Richelieu; the comprehensive intellect 
of Burke, without his learning, and the diplomatic 
ability of Talleyrand, without his coldness. In haughti- 
ness, a rival of Chatham; in devotion to his country’s 
interests, a peer of Hampden; in boldness of speech, 


COLLEGE AND STATE 5 


and action, an equal of Brougham, Bismarck’s qualities 
are in most unique combination. 

Though intensely German in all his tastes and pe- 
culiarities, Bismarck is by no means distinguished for 
those acquirements so much valued by Germans. In 
proficiency in purely literary fields he can stand no 
comparison with his friend and ally, Gortschakoff. 
But, while ranking with few of his many eminent con- 
temporaries in literary power, he stands among them 
all without a peer in those powers of cool judgment, 
quick determination, and masterly execution which 
make up the statesman’s character. But he is a 
Prussian and his talents are such as are usually met 
with in the chief officer of state in a virtually unlimited 
monarchy. All his faculties seem moulded for admin- 
istration and legislation, for framing statutes, nego- 
tiating treaties and organizing armies. And the single- 
ness of his aim has concentrated his powers. ‘The ex- 
tension and firm establishment of Prussian empire has 
all along been the cause for which and under whose 
inspiration he has accomplished by a few master-strokes 
such enterprises as would have been regarded as chimert- 
cal by a more timid or less commanding genius. In 
1866 one short week saw the humiliation of Austria 
and the thwarting of France. The pleasing results of 
that stupendous week’s work were the transformation 
of Prussia’s former strategic weakness into actual 
strength by making her territory one compact mass and 
the consequent increase of Prussian influence in Europe. 
A campaign of almost unrivalled brilliancy and rapidity 
then brought proud France to the feet of Prussia, ex- 
posing the ‘‘misunderstood incapacity’ of Napoleon 
and adding the smiling fields of Alsace and Lorraine 
to the already powerful kingdom; and the victor of 
Sedan ended his course of victory by placing an em- 
peror’s crown upon the brow of his King. 

‘Ever since his contact with Austrian intrigue at 
Frankfort-on-the-Main caused the scales to fall from 


8 COLLEGE AND STATE 


his eyes, all Bismarck’s public actions have been indica: 
tive of keenness of insight, clearness of judgment, and 
promptness of decision. As a member of the Federal 
Diet, he quickly and accurately divined the motives and 
aims of Austria and promptly and providently arrayed 
himself in direct opposition to them. He saw that 
more than ordinary influence was to belong to the clear- 
sighted man who then represented Russia in Frank- 
fort, and, with his keen eye on the future, successfully 
cultivated the friendship of the great Gortschakoff. 
He seems to have been the first to perceive the true 
weakness of Napoleon’s character and the real empti- 
ness of all his schemes for Italian unity and for the 
general good of mankind. His penetrating glance dis- 
covered the really feeble condition of Austria and de- 
tected the gullibility of Napoleon. He had learned 
many an useful lesson in the severe school of diplomacy 
in which he had studied. No tricks of policy, no sub- 
tilties of diplomacy could mislead one who gained his 
early experience among political tricksters and who is 
himself the keenest of diplomatists. His keenness of 
insight, begetting vivid conceptions of every position 
in all its bearings, has mapped out before him every 
possible line of action; his clearness of judgment has, 
with almost unerring accuracy, pointed out the one 
which might be most advantageously adopted. 
Bismarck’s vivid conceptive powers are naturally 
combined with an impulsiveness which, if not checked 
by judgment and restrained by circumstances, might be- 
tray him into rashness. But, being under the constant 
necessity of carefully thinking out every line of action 
and laboriously planning every mode of execution, in 
order that his measures may be acceptable to his royal 
master, every tendency to rashness has been counter- 
balanced and neutralized by the necessity for delibera- 
tion. And, though the great chancellor often chafes 
fiercely under the restraints thus imposed upon him, he, 
nevertheless, owes to this very restraint much of his 


COLLEGE AND STATE 9 


success. William has always yielded in more important 
matters to the genius of his great subject, but frequently 
only after long and severe struggles, which have greatly 
worn upon the chancellor at the same time that they 
have purged his schemes of every rash element. ‘The 
King possesses more force of moral character and stub- 
bornness of will than clearness of intellectual insight, 
and his favor, often so hard to win, is therefore essen- 
tial even to the all-powerful Bismarck. Only an uncon- 
querable energy and an indomitable will have prevented 
the premier from retiring from a position necessarily so 
harassing. Obstacles seem only to whet his activity and 
increase his power. 

With unmeasured energy and surprising power of 
concentration are combined the firmness, the quickness 
of resolve, and the ability for prompt action so neces- 
sary to leaders. But Bismarck’s firmness, while pointed 
with intrepidity, is disfigured by harshness. Nothing 
could be harsher than his means of removing from his 
path some antagonist or rival and he has often proved 
unscrupulous in the use of these means. But our con- 
demnation of. Bismarck’s occasional bad faith should 
be surrounded by many qualifications and explanations. 
We can never justify the wilful disregard of justice 
or the wilful breaking of faith. But in a man who is 
conscious of great powers, whose mind is teeming and 
overflowing with great political plans and dreaming of 
grand national triumphs, and who, withal, is hampered 
on every side by almost every circumstance of his sur- 
roundings we can at least understand an occasional 
breach of honor, and, in the presence of so many grand 
and peerless qualities and so many noble purposes, can 
perhaps forgive a want of integrity which so seldom 
exhibits itself. And even when uprightness is wanting 
in his purposes or in his choice of means, its place is 
filled by uncommon wisdom in action. 

Burke has somewhere spoken of what, in his usually 
happy manner, he has styled ‘‘retrospective wisdom and 


10 COLLEGE AND STATE 


historic patriotism’; of these the wisdom and patriot- 
ism of Bismarck are the direct opposites. His is the 
wisdom that penetrates and provides for the future; 
his is the patriotism that impels him to exhibit his love 
for his country in constant endeavors to secure for her 
permanent power and prosperity. 

The history of modern times furnishes few examples 
of such minds as that of this now famous German. We 
can find on record few instances in which a compara- 
tively small and virtually dependent kingdom has been 
raised in eight years to the proud place of a first-class 
power by the genius of a single man. Few indeed are 
the modern statesmen who have possessed even a small 
part of Bismarck’s creative power backed and pointed 
by his insight and energy. ‘The man who has of late 
modified and directed the whole course of European 
events; the man who was able to destroy the power of 
Austria, humble France, unify Germany, endow Prussia 
with immense and unwonted strength, and command the 
uniform support of Russia; the man who was bold 
enough to take all temporal power from the German 
Roman Catholic Church in the face of so many thou- 
sands of German Roman Catholics; the man who, by 
mere genius and force of character, has attained the 
proudest position in all Europe, will not soon be for- 
gotten. Prussia will not soon find another Bismarck. 

ATTICUS. 


WILLIAM EARL CHATHAM 


PRIZE ESSAY. SIGNED ‘‘THOMAS W. WILSON, ’79, OF 
N. C.”’ FROM THE “NASSAU LITERARY MAGAZINE,”’ 
OCTOBER, 1878, VOL. XXXIV, NO. 3, PP. 99-105. 


EE Westminster Abbey’s arched roof, with 
commanding mien, haughty features, and gesture 
of authority, stands the statue of Chatham. Visitors 
to the venerable old church may see in the hard lines of 
the cold marble the lifeless yet life-like reproduction of 
the striking form of the great statesman; but to all 
who have learned, in the pages of history, to compre- 
hend the character and work of Chatham, this piece of 
stone must seem to fall very far short of bringing before 
their imaginations the real person of the great Com- 
moner. A skillful sculptor might trace the lines of 
cunning policy and of secret scheming, the habitual air 
of authority upon the face of a Metternich, and we 
would recognize the man himself in his efigy; he might 
chisel the marks of cruel purpose, of uncurbed and de- 
fiant ambition, of pitiless despotism upon the spare 
visage of a Richelieu and we could wish for no better 
reminder of the man; he might preserve the deep-cut 
wrinkles that spoke of thought, the firmly-set mouth 
that indicated an inflexible determination, upon the open 
countenance of a Hampden; but the marble must have 
the warmth of life infused into it by the hand of God 
before it could resemble the dwelling of Chatham’s 
high-wrought, passionate, many-sided nature. 

It is indeed the diversity of his genius which first 
strikes us as we look back to the elder Pitt. In him 
consummate powers kept company with small weak- 
nesses, strong wisdom stood side by side with weak 

II 


12 COLLEGE AND STATE 


folly, truthfulness and earnestness were contrasted with 
affectation and pedantry. ‘To the careless student of 
history Pitt’s character, made up as it was of qualities 
the very opposites of each other, might at first seem 
to have been inconsistent with itself. But it was a 
character of great power, because in reality of singular 
unity. His many talents, his capacity for good, his 
capacity for evil, his wisdom, his folly, his strength, 
his weakness, apparently at war among themselves, 
were reconciled and brought into harmony by the 
concentrating power of strong convictions. Prior 
to a thoughtful investigation of the history of 
his times, however, there would seem to be some 
cause for surprise that such a man as Pitt should have 
risen to the head of the state when he did; for few 
men’s tempers ever clashed more roughly with their 
surroundings, ever sympathized less with the tastes and 
tendencies of the day, than did the temper of the great 
Commoner. Indeed he harmonized with his age in 
nothing but in affectation, and even his affectation had 
an earnestness and a frankness about it which did not 
belong to the all-pervading affectation of the society 
around him. He was in everything enthusiastically 
earnest, and his age laughed at earnestness; he was 
vehement, and his age affected coldness and indifference; 
he was sternly virtuous, scorning corruption, and his age 
was skeptical of virtue, nursing corruption; he had 
eager, burning beliefs and was actuated by a warm love 
for principle, and his age delighted in doubtings and 
questionings, was guided by no principle save that of 
expediency; he was used constantly and confidently to 
appeal to the higher, brighter, purer instincts of human 
nature, and his age doubted the existence of any such 
instincts, nay, even argued from its own experience that 
all human nature was low and pulseless. He stood, in 
fact, almost alone—above the masses who, from sheer 
admiration, supported him, and in their enthusiasm idol- 
ized him; separated by all his tastes and sympathies 


COLLEGE AND STATE 13 


from those classes of society with which he was naturally 
thrown by virtue of his high public station. 

That a man thus isolated from his fellows should 
wield undisputed power over them seems at first beyond 
explanation. But as we study his character more closely 
the mystery which hangs around his ability to exercise 
unquestioned authority over those who were entirely out 
of sympathy with him clears rapidly away. The ele- 
ments of his power are not far to seek. They lay almost 
altogether within himself. Outwardly he was every 
inch a leader. Every attitude, every gesture, each play 
of feature, each tone of voice bore witness of a will 
that must be master. And men were speedily convinced 
of the depth and strength of the nature thus outwardly 
shadowed forth. They bowed to a will which itself 
bent to no obstacle; they feared, even while they sneered 
at, the personal purity which gave such a keen edge to 
his attacks upon corrupt opponents. Their hearts in- 
stinctively warmed toward a man whose patriotism was 
so real. Selfish policies fell beneath the onsets of a 
man whose great intellect gave such resistless force to 
the convictions he so boldly avowed. 

Pitt’s nature was so passionate as to be almost tragic, 
rendering his career an essentially dramatic one. Pas- 
sion indeed was the ground-work of his character; and 
because, led on by ardor, he trod steadily onward to- 
ward the ends he had marked out for himself, the name 
of Chatham has become to Englishmen a synonym of 
the highest statesmanship. And certainly, if we con- 
ceive of statesmanship as being that resolute and 
vigorous advance towards the realization of high, 
definite, and consistent aims which issues from the un- 
reserved devotion of a strong intellect to the service of 
the state and to the solution of all the multiform prob- 
lems of public policy, Pitt’s statesmanship was of the 
highest order. His devotion to his country’s service was 
as intense as it was entire; and the intellect whose every 
power he brought to bear upon the direction of her af- 


14 COLLEGE AND STATE 


fairs compassed its duty with a vigor commensurate with 
its colossal proportions. To enquire why Pitt so com- 
pletely identified himself with the fortunes of England 
would be an invidious task. The motives which prompt 
to great deeds are often as hidden as the deeds them- 
selves are conspicuous. Pitt’s self-love was boundless, 
and small men can, therefore, see nothing in his high 
aims but an inordinate desire to gratify ambition, to 
exalt self. But to those who believe that there is some 
nobility in human nature, and especially to those who 
can see how small a part of his real character Pitt’s 
egotism constituted, his ardent, absorbing patriotism 
is sufficient cause for the belief that there was much of 
true disinterestedness in his great career. 

Each quality of Pitt’s mind bespoke the ardor of his 
nature. Even his affectation and his pedantry, like his 
love and determination and pride, had caught the hue 
of passion. It was impossible for such a man to espouse 
any cause with coldness. With him every act must be 
an act of warm enthusiasm. His mind was strong and 
clear, his will was unswerving, his convictions were un- 
compromising, his imagination was powerful enough to 
invest all plans of national policy with a poetic charm, 
his confidence in himself was implicit, his love for his 
country was real and intense. Of course, then, he entered 
into the realities of public life with all the vigor of a 
large and earnest soul, with all the keen interest im- 
parted by a vivid imagination, and it is not strange that 
his policy was well-defined and determined, straightfor- 
ward and brilliant. The startling, far-reaching results 
of his administration, moulding the future history of 
the world, were such as appealed to the admiration and 
won the approbation of a people the very marrow of 
whose nature is a spirit of adventure, enterprise, con- 
quest. What could be more impressive than a policy 
which, in winning India for the English Crown, built 
a great empire in the far East; in driving the French 
from America, made our great republic a possibility in 


COLLEGE AND STATE 15 


the far West; and, in lending constant and effective aid 
to Prussia’s great Frederick, prepared the destiny of 
her greater Bismarck? Such having been the work of 
the elder Pitt, Englishmen may justly regard him as 
high among the greatest statesmen of a great race. And 
yet his errors were many and grave. They were, how- 
ever, such as are incident upon a policy whose authors 
seek, with whole-souled ardor, with keen enthusiasm, to 
carry out great principles in all their integrity. Such a 
policy is always admirable in the abstract, but, in prac- 
tice, is seldom safe. In a free government, founded 
upon public opinion, the governmental machinery is so 
nicely balanced, opposite parties, opposing forces of 
thought, generally exercise powers so nearly equal, that 
great principles must be worked out cautiously, step by 
step, seldom attaining triumphant ascendency by a 
course of uninterrupted success—by only a few bold 
and rapid strokes. Public opinion must not be out- 
stripped, but kept pace with. ‘Time, indeed, has traced 
out to their end all the greater lines of policy which in 
their beginnings bore indications of the strokes of Pitt’s 
decided hand. But he had lain in his grave many years 
before some of the most prominent measures which he 
had advocated were carried out in their fullness; and 
during his lifetime, while he was still a power in the 
state, even his towering influence fell powerless when 
he sought to force his country to follow the paths of 
foreign policy which he had cleared for her, and which 
he had shown to be the only roads to honor and safety. 
The enormous strain which war had brought upon the 
Treasury was thought to be cause for serious alarm, 
and the reaction thus brought about, seconded by the 
sinister influence of an unscrupulous king, thrust a ruin- 
Ous peace upon the country. Pitt left the Cabinet to be 
re-stricken by the disease which finally sapped the 
strength of his imperial intellect. His life drew rapidly 
toward its close; but he had done enough to set a seal 
to his fame—enough to mark that as the highest type 


16 COLLEGE AND STATE 


of statesmanship which, with conscientious purity, by an 
undeviating course, with cool judgment and prompt de- 
termination, with a bright hope and a passionate patriot- 
ism, Overpowering opposition, subordinating party to 
national interests, constantly and confidently seeks to 
build a great policy upon broad, deep, homogeneous 
principles. Such, with all its small follies and minor 
inconsistencies, despite disfiguring arrogance and over- 
bearing pride, was the statesmanship of William Pitt. 

If, because his statesmanship was whole-souled and 
dazzlingly successful, we do not wonder that William 
Pitt has been considered worthy of a place among the 
very first of English statesmen, still less can we be sur- 
prised that he has been called the first of Parliamentary 
orators. If the passionate intensity which entered so 
largely into the texture of his character lent so much of 
force, so much brilliant boldness, to his plans of admin- 
istration, what masterly power must it have imparted 
to his oratory! Passion is the pith of eloquence. But 
it alone cannot make the consummate orator; for while 
it gives strength, it may be rugged and cumbersome. 
Imagination must be present to give it wings and a 
graceful flight. And one of the most striking features of 
Pitt’s mind was ‘“‘a poetic imaginativeness” which set his 
words fairly aglow with beauty. While vivid passion 
blazed out in his orations, the reality of the convictions 
he so fearlessly uttered hid the exaggeration of his dic- 
tion, transfiguring all that was bombastic and ungrace- 
ful, and clothing with real grace his theatrical airs. Un- 
fortunately our only trustworthy information concern- 
ing his oratorical powers comes from meagre tradition. 
Those who had seen his noble figure in striking action, 
his eagle eye alight with the thoughts that stirred within 
him, have left us only some scanty outlines of his more 
brilliant thoughts and most memorable flights of rhet- 
oric. The main bodies of all his great speeches, these 
thoughts which constituted the warp and woof of his 
masterly statements of political truths and his moving 


COLLEGE AND STATE 17 


appeals in behalf of a broad, patriotic, and consistent 
state policy, are irretrievably lost to us. But, aside from 
the unanimous testimony of his contemporaries, the 
fragmentary utterances which we know to have fallen 
from his own lips bear ample witness to his unrivalled 
powers, being laden, even for us, with much of their old 
potency. Even upon the printed page, the echo of his 
impassioned accents seems yet to linger about his words. 
Although in his youthful studies of Demosthenes he had 
failed to catch the great Athenian’s purity of style, he 
recognized, as the movings of a kindred spirit, his burn- 
ing vehemence. Athens had at times responded as one 
man to the rapid, vehement, cogent sentences of Demos- 
thenes; the British Parliament, the English nation, 
harkened with glad eagerness to the organ tones of 
Pitt’s eloquence, and dared not disobey. 

William Pitt was the second of that long line of great 
commoners of which gifted, wise, unscrupulous Robert 
Walpole was the first, and which has moulded English 
policy down to the day of shrewd, fickle, brilliant, plausi- 
ble Benjamin Disraeli. In one respect Pitt resembled 
the now exalted Jew: he had an unhesitating, almost 
boundless confidence in himself, in the wisdom of his 
own aims. But Beaconsfield loves and has confidence 
in himself alone; Pitt loved and trusted the English peo- 
ple as well—for he was himself an Englishman! 

With Pitt’s acceptance of an earldom not only his 
oficial power but also much of his innate greatness 
passed away. Disease had unmanned him, and he re- 
fused to aid his country at a time of sorest need, thus, 
in a moment of folly, well nigh undoing the great work 
of a memorable lifetime. William Pitt was a noble 
statesman; the Earl of Chatham was a noble ruin. But 
in his death we catch a faint glimmer of his old man- 
hood. Under the deepening shadow of a gathering 
storm we obtain a last glimpse of Chatham, as he 
stands, himself a wreck, holding up before a blind Min- 


18 COLLEGE AND STATE 


istry a picture of the dark ruin which was awaiting them. 
With some of his old haughtiness the austere old man 
rises to answer one who had dared to reply to him, and 
falls, never to rise again. 


CABINET GOVERNMENT IN THE UNITED 
STATES 


WRITTEN WHILE WILSON WAS A SENIOR AT PRINCETON 
AND PUBLISHED IN THE “INTERNATIONAL RE- 
VIEW,’ AUGUST, 1879, VOL. VI, PP. 46-163. IT 
IS A CURIOUS FACT, RECALLED DURING THE LATER 
YEARS OF WILSON’S LIFE, THAT HENRY CABOT 
LODGE WAS EDITOR OF THE “INTERNATIONAL RE- 
VIEW’ AND THUS BECAME THE PUBLISHER OF THE 
FUTURE PRESIDENT’S FIRST ARTICLE. 


ei patriotism seems of late to have been exchang- 
ing its wonted tone of confident hope for one of 
desponding solicitude. Anxiety about the future of our 
institutions seems to be daily becoming stronger in the 
minds of thoughtful Americans. A feeling of uneasiness 
is undoubtedly prevalent, sometimes taking the shape 
of a fear that grave, perhaps radical, defects in our 
mode of government are militating against our liberty 
and prosperity. A marked and alarming decline in 
statesmanship, a rule of levity and folly instead of wis- 
dom and sober forethought in legislation, threaten to 
shake our trust not only in the men by whom our na- 
tional policy is controlled, but also in the very princi- 
ples upon which our Government rests. Both State and 
National legislatures are looked upon with nervous 
suspicion, and we hail an adjournment of Congress as a 
temporary immunity from danger. In casting about for 
the chief cause of the admitted evil, many persons have 
convinced themselves that it is to be found in the 
principle of universal suffrage. When Dr. Woolsey, in 
his admirable work on Political Science, speaks with 
despondency of the influence of this principle upon our 
19 


20 COLLEGE AND STATE 


political life, he simply gives clear expression to mis- 
givings which he shares with a growing minority of his 
countrymen. We must, it is said, purge the constitu- 
encies of their ignorant elements, if we would have high- 
minded, able, worthy representatives. We see adven- 
turers, who in times of revolution and confusion were 
suffered to climb to high and responsible places, still 
holding positions of trust; we perceive that our institu- 
tions, when once thrown out of gear, seem to possess 
no power of self-readjustment,—and we hasten to cast 
discredit upon that principle the establishment of which 
has been regarded as America’s greatest claim to politi- 
cal honor,—the right of every man to a voice in the 
Government under which he lives. The existence of 
such sentiments is in itself an instructive fact. But 
while it is indisputably true that universal suffrage is a 
constant element of weakness, and exposes us to many 
dangers which we might otherwise escape, its operation 
does not suffice alone to explain existing evils. Those 
who make this the scapegoat of all our national griev- 
ances have made too superficial an analysis of the abuses 
about which they so loudly complain. 

What is the real cause of this solicitude and doubt? 
It is, in our opinion, to be found in the absorption of 
all power by a legislature which is practically irresponsi- 
ble for its acts. But even this would not necessarily be 
harmful, were it not for the addition of a despotic 
principle which it is my present purpose to consider. 

At its highest development, representative govern- 
ment is that form which best enables a free people to 
govern themselves. The main object of a representa- 
tive assembly, therefore, should be the discussion of 
public business. They should legislate as if in the pres- 
ence of the whole country, because they come under the 
closest scrutiny and fullest criticism of all the repre- 
sentatives of the country speaking in open and free de- 
bate. Only in such an assembly, only in such an at- 
mosphere of publicity, only by means of such a vast 


COLLEGE AND STATE 21 


investigating machine, can the different sections of a 
great country learn each other’s feelings and interests. 
It is not enough that the general course of legislation 
is known to all. Unless during its progress it is sub- 
jected to a thorough, even a tediously prolonged, proc- 
ess of public sifting, to the free comment of friend and 
foe alike, to the ordeal of battle among those upon 
whose vote its fate depends, an act of open legislation 
may have its real intent and scope completely concealed 
by its friends and undiscovered by its enemies, and it 
may be as fatally mischievous as the darkest measures 
of an oligarchy or a despot. Nothing can be more 
obvious than the fact that the very life of free, popular 
institutions is dependent upon their breathing the brac- 
ing air of thorough, exhaustive, and open discussions, 
or that select Congressional committees, whose proceed- 
ings must from their very nature be secret, are, as means 
of legislation, dangerous and unwholesome. Parlia- 
ments are forces for freedom; for ‘‘talk is persuasion, 
persuasion is force, the one force which can sway free- 
men to deeds such as those which have made England 
what she is,”’ or our English stock what it ts. 

Congress is a deliberative body in which there is little 
real deliberation; a legislature which legislates with no 
real discussion of its business. Our Government is prac- 
tically carried on by irresponsible committees. Too few 
Americans take the trouble to inform themselves as to 
the methods of Congressional management; and, as a 
consequence, not many have perceived that almost abso- 
lute power has fallen into the hands of men whose irre- 
sponsibility prevents the regulation of their conduct by 
the people from whom they derive their authority. The 
most important, most powerful man in the government 
of the United States in time of peace is the Speaker of 
the House of Representatives. Instead of being merely 
an executive officer, whose principal duties are those 
immediately connected with the administration of the 
rules of order, he is a potent party chief, the only chief 


22 COLLEGE AND STATE 


of any real potency,—and must of necessity be so. He 
must be the strongest and shrewdest member of his 
party in the lower House; for almost all the real busi- 
ness of that House is transacted by committees whose 
members are his nominees. Unless the rules of the 
House be suspended by a special two-thirds vote, every 
bill introduced must be referred, without debate, to the 
proper Standing Committee, with whom rests the privi- 
lege of embodying it, or any part of it, in their reports, 
or of rejecting it altogether. The House very seldom 
takes any direct action upon any measures introduced 
by individual members; its votes and discussions are al- 
most entirely confined to committee reports and com- 
mittee dictation. ‘The whole attitude of business de- 
pends upon forty-seven Standing Committees. Even 
the discussions upon their directive reports are merely 
nominal,—liberal forms, at most. ‘Take, as an exam- 
ple of the workings of the system, the functions and 
privileges of the Committee of Ways and Means. To 
it is intrusted the financial policy of the country; its 
chairman is, in reality, our Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
With the aid of his colleagues he determines the course 
of legislation upon finance; in English political phrase, 
he draws up the budget. All the momentous questions 
connected with our finance are debated in the private 
sessions of this committee, and there only. For, when 
the budget is submitted to the House for its considera- 
tion, only a very limited time is allowed for its discus- 
sion; and, besides the member of the committee to 
whom its introduction is intrusted, no one is permitted 
to speak save those to whom he through courtesy yields 
the floor, and who must have made arrangements be- 
forehand with the Speaker to be recognized. Where, 
then, is there room for thorough discussion,—for dis- 
cussion of any kind? If carried, the provisions of the 
budget must be put into operation by the Secretary of 
the Treasury, who may be directly opposed to the 
principles which it embodies. If lost, no one save Con- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 23 


gress itself is responsible for the consequent embarrass- 
ment into which the nation is brought,—and Congress 
as a body is not readily punishable. 

It must at once be evident to every thinking man that 
a policy thus regulated cannot be other than vacillating, 
uncertain, devoid of plan or consistency. ‘This is cer- 
tainly a phase of representative government peculiar 
to ourselves. And yet its development was most natural 
and apparently necessary. It is hardly possible for a 
body of several hundred men, without official or au- 
thoritative leaders, to determine upon any line of action 
without interminable wrangling and delays injurious to 
the interests under their care. Left to their own re- 
sources, they would be as helpless as any other mass 
meeting. Without leaders having authority to guide 
their deliberations and give a definite direction to the 
movement of legislation; and, moreover, with none of 
that sense of responsibility which constantly rests upon 
those whose duty it is to work out to a successful issue 
the policies which they themselves originate, yet with 
full power to dictate policies which others must carry 
into execution,—a recognition of the need of some sort 
of leadership, and of a division of labor, led to the 
formation of these Standing Committees, to which are 
intrusted the shaping of the national policy in the sev- 
eral departments of administration, as well as the pre- 
rogatives of the initiative in legislation and leadership 
in debate. When theoretically viewed, this is an in- 
genious and apparently harmless device, but one which, 
in practice, subverts that most fundamental of all the 
principles of a free State,—the right of the people to a 
potential voice in their own government. Great meas- 
ures of legislation are discussed and determined, not 
conspicuously in public session of the people’s repre- 
sentatives, but in the unapproachable privacy of com- 
mittee rooms. 

But what less imperfect means of representative goy- 
ernment can we find without stepping beyond the bounds 


24 COLLEGE AND STATE 


of a true republicanism? Certainly none other than 
those which were rejected by the Constitutional Con- 
vention. When the Convention of 1787, upon the sub- 
mission of the report of the Committee of Detail, came 
to consider the respective duties and privileges of the 
legislative and executive departments, and the relations 
which these two branches of the Government should 
sustain towards each other, many serious questions pre- 
sented themselves for solution. One of the gravest of 
these was, whether or not the interests of the public 
service would be furthered by allowing some of the 
higher officers of State to occupy seats in the legislature. 
The propriety and practical advantage of such a course 
were obviously suggested by a similar arrangement un- 
der the British Constitution, to which our political 
fathers often and wisely looked for useful hints. But 
since the spheres of the several departments were in 
the end defined with all the clearness, strictness, and 
care possible to a written instrument, the opinion pre- 
vailed among the members of the Convention that it 
would be unadvisable to establish any such connection 
between the Executive and Congress. They thought, 
in their own fervor of patriotism and intensity of re- 
spect for written law, that paper barriers would prove 
suficient to prevent the encroachments of any one de- 
partment upon the prerogatives of any other; that these 
vaguely broad laws—or principles of law—would be 
capable of securing and maintaining the harmonious 
and mutually helpful co-operation of the several 
branches; that the exhibition of these general views 
of government would be adequate to the stupendous task 
of preventing the legislature from rising to the pre- 
dominance of influence, which, nevertheless, constantly 
lay within its reach. But, in spite of constitutional bar- 
riers, the legislature has become the imperial power of 
the State, as it must of necessity become under every 
representative system; and experience of the conse- 
quences of a complete separation of the legislative and 


COLLEGE AND STATE 25 


executive branches long since led that able and sagacious 
commentator upon the Constitution, Chief-Justice 
Story, to remark that, “if it would not have been safe 
to trust the heads of departments, as representatives, to 
the choice of the people, as their constituents, it would 
have been at least some gain to have allowed them seats, 
like territorial delegates, in the House of Representa- 
tives, where they might freely debate without a title 
to vote.’ In short, the framers of the Constitution, in 
endeavoring to act in accordance with the principle of 
Montesquieu’s celebrated and unquestionably just 
political maxim,—that the legislative, executive, and 
judicial departments of a free State should be separate, 
—made their separation so complete as to amount to 
isolation. ‘To the methods of representative govern- 
ment which have sprung from these provisions of the 
Constitution, by which the Convention thought so 
carefully to guard and limit the powers of the legis- 
lature, we must look for an explanation, in a large 
measure, of the evils over which we now find ourselves 
lamenting. 

What, then, is Cabinet government? What is the 
change proposed? Simply to give to the heads of the 
Executive departments—the members of the Cabinet— 
seats in Congress, with the privilege of the initiative in 
legislation and some part of the unbounded privileges 
now commanded by the Standing Committees. But the 
advocates of such a change—and they are now not a 
few—deceive themselves when they maintain that it 
would not necessarily involve the principle of minis- 
terial responsibility,—that is, the resignation of the 
Cabinet upon the defeat of any important part of their 
plans. For, if Cabinet officers sit in Congress as off- 
cial representatives of the Executive, this principle of 
responsibility must of necessity come sooner or later to 
be recognized. Experience would soon demonstrate 
the practical impossibility of their holding their seats, 
and continuing to represent the Administration, after 


26 COLLEGE AND STATE 


they had found themselves unable to gain the consent 
of a majority to their policy. Their functions would 
be peculiar. They would constitute a link between the 
legislative and executive branches of the general Gov- 
ernment, and, as representatives of the Executive, must 
hold the right of the initiative in legislation. Other- 
wise their position would be an anomalous one indeed. 
There would be little danger and evident propriety in 
extending to them the first right of introducing meas- 
ures relative to the administration of the several de- 
partments; and they could possess such a right without 
denying the fullest privileges to other members. But, 
whether granted this initiative or not, the head of each 
department would undoubtedly find it necessary to take 
a decided and open stand for or against every measure 
bearing upon the affairs of his department, by whomso- 
ever introduced. No high-spirited man would long re- 
main in an office in the business of which he was not 
permitted to pursue a policy which tallied with his own 
principles and convictions. If defeated by both Houses, 
he would naturally resign; and not many years would 
pass before resignation upon defeat would have become 
an established precedent,—and resignation upon de- 
feat is the essence of responsible government. In argu- 
ing, therefore, for the admission of Cabinet officers into 
the legislature, we are logically brought to favor re- 
sponsible Cabinet government in the United States. 

But, to give to the President the right to choose 
whomsoever he pleases as his constitutional advisers, 
after having constituted Cabinet officers ex officio mem- 
bers of Congress, would be to empower him to appoint 
a limited number of representatives, and would thus be 
plainly at variance with republican principles. The 
highest order of responsible government could, then, 
be established in the United States only by laying upon 
the President the necessity of selecting his Cabinet from 
among the number of representatives already chosen by 
the people, or by the legislatures of the States. 


COLLEGE AND STATE ” 


Such a change in our legislative system would not be 
so radical as it might at first appear: it would certainly 
be very far from revolutionary. Under our present 
system we suffer all the inconveniences, are hampered 
by all that is defective in the machinery, of responsible 
government, without securing any of the many benefits 
which would follow upon its complete establishment. 
Cabinet officers are now appointed only with the con- 
sent of the Senate. : Such powers as a Cabinet with re- 
sponsible leadership must possess are now divided 
among the forty-seven Standing Committees, whose pre- 
rogatives of irresponsible leadership savor of despot- 
ism, because exercised for the most part within the 
secret precincts of a committee room, and not under 
the eyes of the whole House, and thus of the whole 
country. These committees, too, as has been said, rule 
without any of that freedom of public debate which 1s 
essential to the liberties of the people. Their measures 
are too often mere partisan measures, and are hurried 
through the forms of voting by a party majority whose 
interest it is that all serious opposition, all debate that 
might develop obstructive antagonism, should be sup- 
pressed. Under the conditions of Cabinet government, 
however, full and free debates are sure to take place. 
For what are these conditions? According as their 
policy stands or falls, the ministers themselves stand 
or fall; to the party which supports them each discus- 
sion involves a trial of strength with their opponents; 
upon it depends the amount of their success as a party; 
while to the opposition the triumph of ministerial plans 
means still further exclusion from office, their over- 
throw, accession to power. To each member of the 
assembly every debate offers an opportunity for placing 
himself, by able argument, in a position to command a 
place in any future Cabinet that may be formed from 
the ranks of his own party; each speech goes to the 
building up (or the tearing down) of his political for- 
tunes. There is, therefore, an absolute certainty that 


28 COLLEGE AND STATE 


every phase of every subject will be drawn carefully 
and vigorously, will be dwelt upon with minuteness, 
will be viewed from every possible standpoint. The leg- 
islative, holding full power of final decision, would find 
itself in immediate contact with the executive and its 
policy. Nor would there be room for factious govern- 
ment or factious opposition. Plainly, ministers must 
found their policies, an opposition must found its at- 
tacks, upon well-considered principles; for in this open 
sifting of debate, when every feature of every measure, 
even to the motives which prompted it, is the subject 
of outspoken discussion and keen scrutiny, no chicanery, 
no party craft, no questionable principles can long hide 
themselves. Party trickery, legislative jobbery, are de- 
prived of the very air they breathe,—the air of secrecy, 
of concealment. ‘The public is still surprised whenever 
they find that dishonest legislation has been allowed to 
pass unchallenged. Why surprised? As things are, 
measures are determined in the interests of corpora- 
tions, and the suffering people know almost nothing of 
them until their evil tendencies crop out in actual execu- 
tion. Under lobby pressure from interested parties, 
they have been cunningly concocted in the closest ses- 
sions of partisan committees, and, by the all-powerful 
aid of party machinery, have been hurried through the 
stages of legislation without debate; so that even Press 
correspondents are often as ignorant of the real na- 
ture of such special measures as the outside public. 
Any searching debate of such questions would at once 
have brought the public eye upon them, and how could 
they then have stood? Lifting the lid of concealment 
must have been the discovery to all concerned of their 
unsavory character. Light would have killed them. 
We are thus again brought into the presence of the 
cardinal fact of this discussion,—that debate is the es- 
sential function of a popular representative body. In 
the severe, distinct, and sharp enunciation of underlying 
principles, the unsparing examination and telling criti- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 29 


cism of opposite positions, the careful, painstaking un- 
ravelling of all the issues involved, which are incident 
to the free discussion of questions of public policy we 
see the best, the only effective, means of educating public 
- opinion.’ Can any one suppose for one moment that, 
in the late heated and confused discussions of the Bland 
silver bill, the Western papers would have had any 
color of justification in claiming that the Resumption 
Act of 1875 was passed secretly and without the knowl- 
edge of the people, if we had then had responsible gov- 
ernment? Although this all-important matter was be- 
fore the country for more than a year; was considered 
by two Congresses, recommended by more than one 
Congressional committee; was printed and circulated 
for the perusal of the people; was much spoken of, 
though little understood by the Press at the time,—the 
general mass of our population knew little or nothing 
about it, for it elicited almost no statesmanlike com- 
ment upon the floor of Congress, was exposed to none 
of the analysis of earnest debate. What, however, 
would have been its history under a well-ordered Cabi- 
net government? It would have been introduced—if 


» introduced at all—to the House by the Secretary of the 


Treasury as a part of the financial policy of the Admin- 
istration, supported by the authority and sanction of 
the entire Cabinet. At once it would have been criti- 
cally scanned by the leaders of the opposition; at each 
reading of the bill, and especially in Committee of the 
Whole, its weak points would have been mercilessly as- 
sailed, and its strong features urged in defence; attacks 
upon its principle by the opposition would have been 
met by an unequivocal avowal of “soft money”’ princi- 
ples from the majority; and, defended by men anxious 
to win honors in support of the ministry, it would have 
been dissected by all those who were at issue with the 
financial doctrines of the majority, discussed and re- 
discussed until all its essential, all its accidental features, 
and all its remotest tendencies had been dinned into the 


30 COLLEGE AND STATE 


public ear, so that no man in the nation could have 
pretended ignorance of its meaning and object. The 
educational influence of such discussions is two-fold, and 
operates in two directions,—upon the members of the 
legislature themselves, and upon the people whom they 
represent. Thus do the merits of the two systems— 
Committee government and government by a responsi- 
ble Cabinet—hinge upon this matter of a full and free 
discussion of all subjects of legislation; upon the princi- 
ple stated by Mr. Bagehot, that “free government is 
self-government,—a government of the people by the 
people.” It is perhaps safe to say, that the Govern- 
ment which secures the most thorough discussions of 
public interests;—whose administration most nearly 
conforms to the opinions of the governed,—is the freest 
and the best.’ And certainly, when judged by this princi- 
ple, government by irresponsible Standing Committees 
can bear no comparison with government by means of a 
responsible ministry; for, as we have seen,—and as 
others besides Senator Hoar have shown,— its essen- 
tial feature is a vicious suppression of debate. 

Only a single glance is necessary to discover how 
utterly Committee government must fail to give effect 
to public opinion. In the first place, the exclusion of 
debate prevents the intelligent formation of opinion on 
the part of the nation at large; in the second place, 
public opinion, when once formed, finds it impossible 
to exercise any immediate control over the action of its 
representatives. ‘There is no one in Congress to speak 
for the nation. Congress is a conglomeration of in- 
harmonious elements; a collection of men representing 
each his neighborhood, each his local interest; an alarm- 
ingly large proportion of its legislation is ‘‘special’’; 
all of it is at best only a limping compromise between 
the conflicting interests of the innumerable localities 
represented. There is no guiding or harmonizing 
power. Are the people in favor of a particular policy, 
—what means have they of forcing it upon the sovereign 


COLLEGE AND STATE 31 


legislature at Washington? None but the most imper- 
fect. If they return representatives who favor it (and 
this is the most they can do), these representatives 
being under no directing power will find a mutual agree- 
ment impracticable among so many, and will finally 
settle upon some policy which satisfies nobody, removes 
no difficulty, and makes little definite or valuable pro- 
vision for the future. They must, indeed, be content 
with whatever measure the appropriate committee 
chances to introduce. Responsible ministries, on the 
other hand, form the policy of their parties; the strength 
of their party is at their command; the course of legis- 
lation turns upon the acceptance or rejection by the 
Houses of definite and consistent plans upon which they 
determine. In forming its judgment of their policy, 
the nation knows whereof it is judging; and, with bien- 
nial Congresses, it may soon decide whether any given 
policy shall stand or fall. The question would then 
no longer be, What representatives shall we choose to 
represent our chances in this haphazard game of legis- 
lation? but, What plans of national administration 
shall we sanction? Would not party programmes mean 
something then? Could they be constructed only to de- 
ceive and bewilder? | 

But, above and beyond all this, a responsible Cabinet 
constitutes a link between the executive and legislative 
departments of the Government which experience de- 
clares in the clearest tones to be absolutely necessary in 
a well-regulated, well-proportioned body politic. None 
can so well judge of the perfections or imperfections 
of a law as those who have to administer it. Look, 
for example, at the important matter of taxation. The 
only legitimate object of taxation is the support of 
Government; and who can so well determine the requi- 
site revenue as those who conduct the Government? Who 
can so well choose feasible means of taxation, available 
sources of revenue, as those who have to meet the prac- 
tical difficulties of tax-collection? And what surer guar- 


32 COLLEGE AND STATE 


antee against exorbitant estimates and unwise taxation 
than the necessity of full explanation and defence before 
the whole House? The same principles, of course, ap- 
ply to all legislation upon matters connected with any 
of the Executive departments. 

Thus, then, not only can Cabinet ministers meet the 
needs of their departments more adequately and under- 
standingly, and conduct their administration better than 
can irresponsible committees, but they are also less 
liable to misuse their powers. Responsible ministers 
must secure from the House and Senate an intelligent, 
thorough, and practical treatment of their affairs; must 
vindicate their principles in open battle on the floor of 
Congress. The public is thus enabled to exercise a 
direct scrutiny over the workings of the Executive de- 
partments, to keep all their operations under a constant 
stream of daylight. Ministers could do nothing under 
the shadow of darkness; committees do all in the dark. 
It can easily be seen how constantly ministers would 
be plied with questions about the conduct of public af- 
fairs, and how necessary it would be for them to satisfy 
their questioners if they did not wish to fall under suspi- 
cion, distrust, and obloquy. 

But, while the people would thus be able to defend 
themselves through their representatives against mal- 
feasance or inefficiency in the management of their busi- 
ness, the heads of the departments would also have 
every opportunity to defend their administration of 
the people’s affairs against unjust censure or crippling 
legislation. Corruption in office would court conceal- 
ment in vain; vicious trifling with the administration of 
public business by irresponsible persons would meet with 
a steady and effective check. The ground would be clear 
for a manly and candid defence of ministerial methods; 
wild schemes of legislation would meet with a cold re- 
pulse from ministerial authority. The salutary effect 
of such a change would most conspicuously appear in the 
increased effectiveness of our now crumbling civil, mili- 


COLLEGE AND STATE aa 


tary, and naval services; for we should no longer be 
cursed with tardy, insufficient, and misapplied appro- 
priations. The ministers of War, of the Navy, of the 
Interior, would be able to submit their estimates in per- 
son, and to procure speedy and regular appropriations; 
and half the abuses at present connected with appro- 
priative legislation would necessarily disappear with the 
present committee system. Appropriations now, though 
often inadequate, are much oftener wasteful and fraudu- 
lent. Under responsible government, every appropria- 
tion asked by an Executive chief, as well as the reasons 
by which he backed his request, would be subjected to 
the same merciless sifting processes of debate as would 
characterize the consideration of other questions. Al- 
ways having their responsible agents thus before them, 
the people would at once know how much they were 
spending, and for what it was spent. 

When we come to speak of the probable influence of 
responsible Cabinet government upon the development 
of statesmanship and the renewal of the now perishing 
growth of statesmanlike qualities, we come upon a vital 
interest of the whole question. Will it bring with it 
worthy successors of Hamilton and Webster? Will 
it replace a leadership of trickery and cunning device 
by one of ability and moral strength? If it will not, 
why advocate it? If it will, how gladly and eagerly and 
imperatively ought we to demand it! The most des- 
potic of Governments under the control of wise states- 
men is preferable to the freest ruled by demagogues. 
Now, there are few more common, and perhaps few 
more reasonable, beliefs than that at all times, among 
the millions of population who constitute the body of 
this great nation, there is here and there to be found 
a man with all the genius, all the deep and. strong pa- 
triotism, all the moral vigor, and all the ripeness of 
knowledge and variety of acquisition which gave power 
and lasting fame to the greater statesmen of our past 
history. We bewail and even wonder at the fact that 


Bay ci COLLEGE AND STATE 


these men do not find their way into public life, to 
claim power and leadership in the service of their coun- 
try. We naturally ascribe their absence to the repug- 
nance which superior minds must feel for the intrigues, 
the glaring publicity, and the air of unscrupulousness 
and even dishonesty which are the characteristics, or at 
least the environments, of political life. In our disap- 
pointment and vexation that they do not, even at the 
most distressing sacrifice of their personal convenience 
and peace, devote themselves to the study and prac- 
tice of statecraft, we turn for comfort to reread his- 
tory’s lesson,—that many countries find their greatest 
statesmen in times of extraordinary crisis or rapid 
transition and progress; the intervals of slow growth 
and uninteresting everyday administration of the gov- 
ernment being noted only for the elevation of medi- 
ocrity, or at most of shrewd cunning, to high adminis- 
trative places. We take cold consolation from the hope 
that times of peril—which sometimes seem close enough 
at hand—will not find us without strong leaders worthy 
of the most implicit confidence. ‘Thus we are enabled 
to arrive at the comfortable and fear-quieting conclu- 
sion that it is from no fault of ours, certainly from no 
defects in our forms of government, that we are ruled 
by scheming, incompetent, political tradesmen, whose 
aims and ambitions are merely personal, instead of by 
broad-minded, masterful statesmen, whose sympathies 
and purposes are patriotic and national. 

To supply the conditions of statesmanship is, we 
conclude, beyond our power; for the causes of its decline 
and the means necessary to its development are beyond 
our ken. Let us take a new departure. Let us, drawing 
light from every source within the range of our knowl- 
edge, make a little independent analysis of the condi- 
tions of statesmanship, with a view to ascertaining 
whether or not it is in reality true that we cannot con- 
tribute to its development, or even perchance give it a 
perennial growth among us. We learn from a critical 


— 


COLLEGE AND STATE 35 


survey of the past, that, so far as political affairs are 
concerned, great critical epochs are the man-making 
epochs of history, that revolutionary influences are man- 
making influences. And why? If this be the law, it 
must have some adequate reason underlying it; and we 
seem to find the reason a very plain and conspicuous 
one. Crises give birth and a new growth to statesman- 
ship because they are peculiarly periods of action, in 
which talents find the widest and the freest scope. They 
are periods not only of action, but also of unusual op- 
portunity for gaining leadership and a controlling and 
guiding influence. It is opportunity for transcendent 
influence, therefore, which calls into active public life 
a nation’s greater minds,—minds which might other- 
wise remain absorbed in the smaller affairs of private 
life. And we thus come upon the principle,—a princi- 
ple which will appear the more incontrovertible the. 
more it is looked into and tested,—that governmental 
forms will call to the work of administration able minds 
and strong hearts constantly or infrequently, accord- 
ing as they do or do not afford them at all times an 
opportunity of gaining and retaining a commanding au- 
thority and an undisputed leadership in the nation’s 
councils. Now it certainly needs no argument to prove 
that government by supreme committees, whose mem- 
bers are appointed at the caprice of an irresponsible 
party chief, by seniority, because of reputation gained 
in entirely different fields, or because of partisan shrewd- 
ness, is not favorable to a full and strong development 
of statesmanship. Certain it is that statesmanship has 
been steadily dying out in the United States since that 
stupendous crisis during which its government felt the 
first throbs of life. In the government of the United 
States there is no place found for the leadership of men 
of real ability. Why, then, complain that we have no 
leaders? The President can seldom make himself recog- 
nized as a leader; he is merely the executor of the sover- 
eign legislative will; his Cabinet officers are little more 


36 COLLEGE AND STATE 


than chief clerks, or superintendents, in the Executive 
departments, who advise the President as to matters 
in most of which he has no power of action independ- 
ently of the concurrence of the Senate. The most 
ambitious representative can rise no higher than the 
chairmanship of the Committee of Ways and Means, 
or the Speakership of the House. The cardinal feature 
of Cabinet government, on the other hand, is responsi- 
ble leadership,—the leadership and authority of a small 
body of men who have won the foremost places in their 
party by a display of administrative talents, by evidence 
of high ability upon the floor of Congress in the stormy 
play of debate. None but the ablest can become leaders 
and masters in this keen tournament in which argu- 
ments are the weapons, and the people the judges. 
Clearly defined, definitely directed policies arouse bold 
and concerted opposition; and leaders of oppositions 
become in time leaders of Cabinets. Such a recognized 
leadership it is that is necessary to the development of 
statesmanship under popular, republican institutions; 
for only such leadership can make politics seem worthy 
of cultivation to men of high mind and aim. 

And if party success in Congress—the ruling body 
of the nation—depends upon power in debate, skill and 
prescience in policy, successful defence of or attacks 
upon ruling ministries, how ill can contending parties 
spare their men of ability from Congress! To keep 
men of the strongest mental and moral fibre in Con- 
gress would become a party necessity. Party triumph 
would then be a matter of might in debate, not of su- 
premacy in subterfuge. The two great national parties 
—and upon the existence of two great parties, with 
clashings and mutual jealousies and watchings, depends 
the health of free political institutions—are dying for 
want of unifying and vitalizing principles. Without 
leaders, they are also without policies, without aims. 
With leaders there must be followers, there must be 
parties. And with leaders whose leadership was earned 


COLLEGE AND STATE 37 


in an open war of principle against principle, by the 
triumph of one opinion over all opposing opinions, par- 
ties must from the necessities of the case have definite 
policies. Platforms, then, must mean something. 
Broken promises will then end in broken power. A Cab- 
inet without a policy that is finding effect in progressive 
legislation is, in a country of frequent elections, inviting 
its own defeat. Or is there, on the other hand, a de- 
termined, aggressive opposition? ‘Then the ministry 
have a right to ask them what they would do under 
similar circumstances, were the reins of government to 
fall to them. And if the opposition are then silent, 
they cannot reasonably expect the country to intrust 
the government to them. Witness the situation of the 
Liberal party in England during the late serious crisis 
in Eastern affairs. Not daring to propose any policy,— 
having indeed, because of the disintegration of the 
party, no policy to propose,—their numerical weakness 
became a moral weakness, and the nation’s ear was 
turned away from them. Eight words contain the sum 
of the present degradation of our political parties: 
‘No leaders, no principles; no principles, no parties. 
’ Congressional leadership is divided infinitesimally; and 
with divided leadership there can be no great party 
units. Drill in debate, by giving scope to talents, in- 
vites talents; raises up a race of men habituated to 
the methods of public business, skilled parliamentary 
chiefs. And, more than this, it creates a much-to-be- 
desired class who early make attendance upon public 
affairs the business of their lives, devoting to the service 
of their country all their better years. Surely the man- 
agement of a nation’s business will, in a well-ordered so- 
ciety, be as properly a matter of life-long training as 
the conduct of private affairs. 

These are but meagre and insufficient outlines of 
some of the results which would follow upon the estab- 
lishment of responsible Cabinet government in the 
United States. Its establishment has not wanted more 


38 COLLEGE AND STATE 


or less outspoken advocacy from others; nor, of course, 
have there been lacking those who are ready to urge 
real or imaginary objections against it, and proclaim 
it an exotic unfit to thrive in American soil. It has 
certainly, in common with all other political systems, 
grave difficulties and real evils connected with it. Dif- 
ficulties and evils are inseparable from every human 
scheme of government; and, in making their choice, a 
people can do no more than adopt that form which 
affords the largest measure of real liberty, whose ma- 
chinery is least imperfect, and which is most susceptible 
to the control of their sovereign will. 

Few, however, have discovered the real defects of 
such a responsible government as that which I now 
advocate. It is said, for instance, that it would render 
the President a mere figurehead, with none of that sta- 
bility of official tenure, or that traditional dignity, 
which is necessary to such figureheads. Would the 
President’s power be curtailed, then, if his Cabinet min- 
isters simply took the place of the Standing Commit- 
tees? Would it not rather be enlarged? He would 
then be in fact, and not merely in name, the head of 
the Government. Without the consent of the Senate, 
he now exercises no sovereign functions that would be 
taken from him by a responsible Cabinet. 

The apparently necessary existence of a partisan Ex- 
ecutive presents itself to many as a fatal objection to 
the establishment of the forms of responsible Cabinet 
government in this country. ‘The President must con- 
tinue to represent a political party, and must continue 
to be anxious to surround himself with Cabinet officers 
who shall always substantially agree with him on all 
political questions. It must be admitted that the intro- 
duction of the principle of ministerial responsibility 
might, on this account, become at times productive of 
mischief unless the tenure of the presidential office were 
made more permanent than it now is. Whether or not 
the presidential term should, under such a change of 


COLLEGE AND STATE 39 


conditions, be lengthened would be one of several prac- 
tical questions which would attend the adoption of a 
system of this sort. But it must be remembered that 
such a state of things as now exists, when we find the 
Executive to be of one party and the majority of Con- 
gress to be of the opposite party, is the exception, by 
no means the rule. Moreover we must constantly keep 
before our minds the fact that the choice now lies be- 
tween this responsible Cabinet government and the rule 
of irresponsible committees which actually exists. It is 
not hard to believe that most presidents would find no 
greater inconvenience, experience no greater unpleas- 
antness, in being at the head of a Cabinet composed of 
political opponents than in presiding, as they must now 
occasionally do, over a Cabinet of political friends who 
are compelled to act in all matters of importance ac- 
cording to the dictation of Standing Committees which 
are ruled by the opposite party. In the, former case, 
the President may, by the exercise of whatever personal 
influence he possesses, affect the action of the Cabinet, 
and, through them, the action of the Houses; in the lat- 
ter he is absolutely helpless. Even now it might prove 
practically impossible for a President to gain from a 
hostile majority in the Senate a confirmation of his ap- 
pointment of a strongly partisan Cabinet drawn from 
his own party. The President must now moreover, 
acting through his Cabinet, simply do the bidding of 
the committees in directing the business of the depart- 
ments. With a responsible Cabinet—even though that 
Cabinet were of the opposite party—he might, if a man 
of ability, exercise great power over the conduct of pub- 
lic affairs; if not a man of ability, but a mere partisan, 
he would in any case be impotent. From these consid- 
erations it would appear that government by Cabinet 
ministers who represent the majority in Congress is no 
more incompatible with a partisan Executive than is 
government by committees representing such a major- 
ity. Indeed, a partisan President might well prefer leg- 


40 COLLEGE AND STATE 


islation through a hostile body at whose deliberations 
he might himself be present, and whose course he might 
influence, to legislation through hostile committees over 
whom he could have no manner of control, direct or in- 
direct. And such conditions would be exceptional. 
But the encroachment of the legislative upon the ex- 
ecutive is deemed the capital evil of our Government 
in its later phases; and it is asked, Would not the power 
of Congress be still more dangerously enlarged, and 
these encroachments made easier and surer, by thus 
making its relations with the Executive closer? By no 
means. he several parts of a perfect mechanism must 
actually interlace and be in strong union in order mutu- 
ally to support and check each other. Here again per- 
manent, dictating committees are the only alternative. 
On the one hand, we have committees directing policies 
for whose miscarriage they are not responsible; on the 
other, we have a ministry asking for legislation for 
whose results they are responsible. In both cases there 
is full power and authority on the part of the legisla- 
ture to determine all the main lines of administration: 
there is no more real control of Executive acts in the 
one case than in the other; but there is an all-important 
difference in the character of the agents employed. 
When carrying out measures thrust upon them by com- 
mittees, administrative officers can throw off all sense 
of responsibility; and the committees are safe from 
punishment, safe even from censure, whatever the issue. 
But in administering laws which have passed under the 
influence of their own open advocacy, ministers must 
shoulder the responsibilities and face the consequences. 
We should not, then, be giving Congress powers or op- 
portunities of encroachment which it does not now pos- 
sess, but should, on the contrary, be holding its powers 
in constant and effective check by putting over it respon- 
sible leaders. A complete separation of the executive 
and legislative is not in accord with the true spirit of 
those essentially English institutions of which our Gov- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 41 


ernment is a characteristic offshoot. The Executive is 
in constant need of legislative co-operation; the legis- 
lative must be aided by an Executive who is in a posi- 
tion intelligently and vigorously to execute its acts. 
There must needs be, therefore, as a binding link be- 
tween them, some body which has no power to coerce 
the one and is interested in maintaining the independ- 
ent effectiveness of the other. Such a link is the re- 
sponsible Cabinet. 

Again, it is objected that we should be cursed with 
that instability of government which results from a 
rapid succession of ministries, a frequent shifting of 
power from the hands of one party to the hands of 
another. This is not necessarily more likely to occur 
under the system of responsibility than now. We 
should be less exposed to such fluctuations of power 
than is the English government. ‘The elective system 
which regulates the choice of United States Senators 
prevents more than one third of the seats becoming 
vacant at once, and this third only once every two years. 
The political complexion of the Senate can be changed 
by a succession of elections. 

But against such a responsible system the alarm-bell 
of centralization is again sounded, and all those who 
dread seeing too much authority, too complete control, 
placed within the reach of the central Government 
sternly set their faces against any such change. ‘They 
deceive themselves. There could be no more despotic 
authority wielded under the forms of free government 
than our national Congress now exercises. It is a des- 
potism which uses its power with all the caprice, all the 
scorn for settled policy, all the wild unrestraint which 
mark the methods of other tyrants as hateful te 
freedom. 

Few of us are ready to suggest a remedy for the evils 
all deplore. We hope that our system is self-adjusting, 
and will not need our corrective interference. This is 
a vain hope! It is no small part of wisdom to know 


42 COLLEGE AND STATE 


how long an evil ought to be tolerated, to see when 
the time has come for the people, from whom springs 
all authority, to speak its doom or prescribe its remedy. 
If that time be allowed to slip unrecognized, our dan- 
gers may overwhelm us, our political maladies may 
prove incurable. 


JOHN BRIGHT 


AN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE THE JEFFERSON SO- 
CIETY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA AND PUB- 
LISHED IN THE “UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA MAGA- 
ZINE,’ MARCH, 1880, VOL. XIX, 354-370. WILSON 
WAS THEN A POST-GRADUATE STUDENT. 


i every effort of comprehension we are made 
painfully conscious of the narrow compass of man’s 
boasted powers of mind. As, when we stand before 
some one of the greater masterpieces of architecture 
and bestow our admiration upon its grand outlines, its 
multiform and uniform strength and grace, its swift and 
high-bending arches, its massive supports, its slender 
summits, we miss the careful carving of its cornices, the 
laborious polish of its marbres, or the modest beauty 
of the exquisite forms of stone, which in cold counter- 
feit of man, guard its portals or stand their solemn, 
silent sentry on its towers—so, when we contemplate 
the great movements of recorded history and attempt 
to take in the broader scope of events and follow the 
main lines of civilization’s “journey with the sun,” we 
overlook, in our wide survey, the inner lives of individ- 
ual nations, the special workings of separate forces, the 
events of individual epochs, the controlling influence of 
individual men—in our endeavor to put ourselves in 
sympathy with mankind we have ceased to sympathize 
with man. ‘The reverse is scarcely less true. If we 
would bestow our attention upon some one event, we 
find ourselves divorcing it from its necessary connec- 
tion with other events and regarding it in nakedness and 
isolation. If we could study the character of some one 
man, though that man be our nearest neighbor or our 


43 


44 COLLEGE AND STATE 


closest friend, we are in constant danger of separating 
him from his surroundings, holding him responsible for 
what circumstances have made him, reckoning him de- 
based by frailties not his own, or exalted by greatness 
which was not born with him but thrust upon him. For- 
tunately, however, when we seek to familiarize our- 
selves with the characters of those men whom it is our 
habit to call great—such men as have led thought or 
conceived philosophies or framed policies—we are re- 
lieved from this embarrassment by one saving circum- 
stance: we find every truly great man identified with 
some special cause. His purposes are steadfastly set 
in some definite direction. The career which he works 
out for himself constitutes so intimate a part of the his- 
tory of his times that to dissociate him from his sur- 
roundings were as impossible as it would be undesirable. 

It is, then, under peculiar advantages that we under- 
take an examination of the character and career of John 
Bright. Certainly no man ever won for himself a more 
definite position or a more certain place than has he. - 
He has attained to honored age, absolutely without de- 
viation from the principles of his youth. His life has 
inseparably interwoven itself with all the greater events 
of later English history. His name has become synony- 
mous with liberalism. Since his entrance into public 
life, no great political reform has been accomplished 
which he has not powerfully helped to triumphant com- 
pletion. Not since then has there been any considerable 
scheme of political reformation which has not been set 
to the music of his eloquence—or any great cause of ad- 
vancement which has not been at some point carried on 
the shoulders of his strength. 

From his very birth he has imbibed free political 
principles. He was born some sixty-nine years ago in 
the busy village of Rochdale, and was bred in the most 
thriving parts of thrifty Lancashire—the modern home 
of liberal politics in England. For modern English lib- 
eralism seems to have been born in the manufacturing 


COLLEGE AND STATE 45 


districts, in the inner heart of Britain, in those busy 
counties in which Nottingham, Shefheld, Leeds, Man- 
chester and Liverpool are clustered. Nothing could 
have been more natural than that the clouds of conserv- 
ative prejudice should have first broken away in these 
homes of industry. As civilization advances and the 
steps of commerce quicken, men are more and more 
massed in great centres of industrial enterprises; and 
it is in these, where similarity of occupation, activity of 
intercourse and community of feeling kindle quick sym- 
pathy among large bodies of men and rouse to active 
intelligence whole classes of society, that broad and gen- 
erous ideas of governmental polity find their firmest 
rootage and their sunniest seasons. It were next to im- 
possible that such principles should find their earliest 
acceptance in agricultural communities or rural neigh- 
borhoods. ‘There, where every condition of disinte- 
gration, and not one of union, is present, combined and 
aggressive action is looked for in vain. Political pur- 
poses are not there easily communicated; new political 
doctrines are not there readily sown. There men’s 
thoughts run as slowly as their plows; men’s purposes 
are as sluggish as their beasts of burden. It were per- 
haps equally idle to look for political impulse to come 
from the mining districts. “There, where every day is 
spent away from the light of the sun, men’s minds seem 
as ill-lighted as the deep galleries in which they wearily 
ply the pick. Their only reform is in riot. They crave 
license, not liberty. 

Trade, indeed, is the great nurse of liberal ideas. 
Men who deal with all the world cannot sympathize 
with those whose thoughts do not reach beyond the lim- 
its of their own immediate neighborhood. ‘The ordi- 
nary English farmer knows no world greater or more 
remote than the nearest market town. The English man- 
ufacturer sells his goods in Calcutta, in Valparaiso, in 
Hong Kong, it may be. When he wishes to buy, the 
cheapest market is the nearest; when he desires to sell, 


46 COLLEGE AND STATE 


the dearest is the nearest. Accordingly when we see 
the cotton printers and spinners of Manchester the first 
to uphold the doctrines and spread the gospel of Free 
Trade, we find no room for surprise. The earliest stir- 
ring of the great agitation which looked towards the 
establishment of Free ‘Trade, were felt about the year 
1836. Manchester and her industrial sisters had re- 
cently been enfranchised by the Reform Act of 1832, 
and the famous Anti-Corn-Law League was one of the 
first and greatest manifestations of the potential influ- 
ence which the manufacturing and trading classes were 
beginning to assume. ‘This stupendous Free Trade 
movement found its ablest directors and its foremost 
leaders amongst the merchants of Manchester and 
its vicinity—leaders who afterwards became the doctors 
of what came to be known as the ‘“‘Manchester School” 
of politicians. Zeal for rational principles of trade 
changed simple unambitious men of business into dili- 
gent politicians, transformed them into orators, ex- 
alted them into statesmen. Foremost among these, by 
reason of zeal, by reason of worth, by reason of intelli- 
gence, was Richard Cobden, a cotton-printer of Man- 
chester. His exalted character and persuasive elo- 
quence made him the directing genius of the great drama 
of agitation set afoot by the League. In economical leg- 
islation his talents proved themselves beyond compari- 
son brilliant and sovereign. But it was not permitted 
him long to survive the great League he had so success- 
fully led. His life ended suddenly upon the triumphant 
completion of his life-work. He died the greatest apos- 
tle of Free ‘Trade—and men now scarcely remember 
that he was anything else. 

The name of John Bright was scarcely less promi- 
nently connected with the work and mission of the 
League than that of Cobden. His first step in public 
life was, like Cobden’s, a step to the leadership of the 
forces of Free Trade. It were not possible or desir- 
able upon this occasion to consider in detail, or even in 


COLLEGE AND STATE 47 


general outline, those Corn Laws against which the 
League organized its forces. Suffice it to say that, 
passed in 1815, their effect had been virtually to exclude 
all foreign corn from the markets of Great Britain, un- 
der the silly pretence of “‘protecting’’ home produce, and 
that it was against this short-sighted policy that the 
forces of Free Trade made their determined stand. 
Never before or since has peaceful political agitation 
been more thoroughly organized or more shrewdly con- 
ducted. Every mail-bag that left Manchester was full to 
overflowing with Free Trade tracts; no conceivable 
method of schooling the people in the doctrines of sound 
economy was neglected. From channel to channel, from 
Tweed to Thames, its principles were preached with all 
the dint of demonstration, all the power of persuasion, 
all the energy of eloquence. Immense bazaars evi- 
denced its enterprise and contributed to its wealth. Un- 
rivalled fairs and unnumbered mass-meetings drove its 
designs to completion. It was a vast movement of 
thought. Every day added to its increasing strength. 
Every wind brought news of its accumulating triumphs. 
It was in this work that Mr. Bright first tried his met- 
tle. It was in this cause that he first developed his gen- 
ius for affairs. His singleness of aim and energy of 
purpose and nobility of conception first discovered them- 
selves in the direction and control of this stupendous 
machinery of propagandism. His character is of strong 
and elastic fibre such as is toughened and strengthened 
by every test. It partakes of all the sober thoughtful- 
ness, the warm and intense earnestness, and the noble 
straightforwardness of that sturdy sect, the Quakers, 
from whose loins he is sprung—that sect which long 
ago, under the energetic leadership of that sterling pio- 
neer and singularly genuine man, William Penn, pene- 
trated the wilds of our thriving northern neighbor and 
laid the first foundations of that illustrious common- 
wealth whose unsurpassed industries are driving Euro- 
pean manufacturers from their own markets. Mr. 


48 COLLEGE AND STATE 


Bright carried to the public platform and into Parlia- 
ment a political creed no less simple and no less openly 
avowed than the religious creed of his sect. And this 
creed was perfected before it was promulgated. Not 
until his thirtieth year did he actively participate in pub- 
lic affairs. His liberalism was then mature. His opin- 
ions were full-grown and fruiting. His convictions were 
rooted and grounded in his very nature. And these 
convictions are vivid beliefs such as constitute the very 
essence of practical statesmanship, when united, as they 
are in him, with an undeviating purpose and a will which 
knows no discouragement and no defeat. ‘These are 
rare gifts to be crowned with the rarer gift of eloquence. 
The campaigns of the League were preéminently speech- 
making campaigns. The gospel of Free Trade was a 
preached gospel. Every public hall in England had 
rung with the appeals of its heralds and the cheers of 
its disciples. In this school was Mr. Bright trained. In 
the proclamation of this gospel were first developed his 
marvellous powers of public speech—powers which 
were first manifested in broken sentences and harsh 
tones, giving little promise of those grand passages of 
eloquence and that voice of unrivalled sweetness, variety 
and strength which have since won for him a place 
among the very greatest of English orators. ‘These 
powers were not slow of growth. They grew with his 
energy and kept pace with his purposes. No orator 
ever more signally illustrated the truth that eloquence 
is not of the lips alone. Eloquence is never begotten by 
empty pates. Grovelling minds are never winged with 
high and worthy thoughts. Eloquence consists not in 
sonorous sound or brilliant phrases. Thought is the 
fibre, thought is the pith, of eloquence. Eloquence lies 
in the thought, not in the throat. It was as the expres- 
sion of his high impulses and strong purposes and saga- 
cious plans and noble courage that John Bright’s ora- 
tory became a tremendous agency in the world of poli- 
tics. It is persuasion inspired by conviction. ‘Out of 


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COLLEGE AND STATE 49 


the abundance of his heart’? his mouth speaks. Public 
speech was the instrumentality by means of which his 
mind struck its overwhelming blows at political preju- 
dice. His words were tapers, which, lit at the fire of 
his convictions, first made visible and then dispelled 
the darkness of political selfishness and social tyranny. 
He has, moreover, the physical, as well as the mental 
and spiritual, gifts of the orator. His frame is large 
and strong; his face is open, truthful and attractive; 
his features are clearly-cut and mobile—almost articu- 
lately expressive. No storm of indignation or scorn 
sweeps through his mind that does not throw its deep 
shadows across his face; no bright hope or light humor 
plays through his thoughts but looks cheerily out at his 
eyes; no firm resolve possesses his heart but speaks in 
his dilated nostril or straight-set lip; no passion burns 
within him but vibrates in the silvery tones of his 
voice. His voice, indeed, is his most perfect physical 
gift. It is described by those who have heard him speak 
as for the most part calm and measured in its tones, 
but with peculiar vibrations of unspeakable power, an- 
swering to the movements of scorn, indignation, pathos, 
or pity that stir his thoughts. It has been likened, in its 
play of varied tones, to a peal of bells. It is such a 
voice as easily finds its way to the hearts of listening 
multitudes—such as reaches with easy compass the far- 
thest limits of vast assemblies—such as relieves statis- 
tics of their monotony and sets argument to music. In 
words which the late Lord Lytton used concerning Ire- 
land’s great orator, we might say, when standing be- 
neath the sounds of his voice as they rose to the rafters 
of Manchester’s great Free Trade Hall, and fell thence 
on the ears of the eager listeners who filled the vast 
spaces of its floor: 


“And as I thought, rose the sonorous swell 
As from some church tower swings the silvery bell; 
Aloft and clear from airy tide to tide, 
It glided easy as a bird may glide. 


50 COLLEGE AND STATE 


To the last verge of that vast audience sent, 

It played with each wild passion as it went; 
Now stirred the uproar—now the murmur stilled, 
And sobs or laughter answered as it willed. 

Then did I know what spells of infinite choice 
To rouse or lull has the sweet human voice. 

Then did I learn to seize the sudden clue 

To the grand, troublous life antique—to view 
Under the rock-stand of Demosthenes, 

Unstable Athens heave her noisy seas.” 


I suppose that it is Mr. Bright’s supreme self-re- 
straint that is the chief charm of his delivery. The 
broad, and silent river is more suggestive of power than 
the hurrying, noisy mountain stream which every pebble 
makes boisterous or complaining. The deep and quiet 
breathings of the sea seem more impressive evidence of 
strength than the spray that is dashed on high as if the 
monster were shaking his huge sides with laughter. The 
heavy storm-cloud is more imposing and awe-striking as 
it sweeps the distant horizon with its quick flames, utter- 
ing its thunders in suppressed mutterings, and rolling 
its billowy lengths in majestic panorama before our 
eyes, than when it overspreads the entire sky in wild 
outbreak, deafening us with its sudden peals and drench- 
ing us with its hasty rains. So the orator who main- 
tains complete sovereignty over his emotions is a thou- 
sandfold more powerful and impressive than he who 
‘saws the air’ and “tears a passion to tatters.’ Emo- 
tional demonstrations should come from his audience, 
not from the orator himself. So, we read of Mr. 
Bright that he seldom gesticulates; he never shouts. 
His passions he never allows to master him. He holds 
himself well in hand. Even at his moments of great- 
est power and most consummate achievement he is 
speaking calmly, but not without the deepest emotion— 
it is, as has been beautifully said, the calmness of white 
heat. 

Mr. Bright’s diction is as self-restrained as the ora- 
tor himself. It is characterized by simple dignity and 


COLLEGE AND STATE st 


supple strength. It has none of the superb imagery or 
the sublime plenitude of Burke’s gorgeous rhetoric; it 
has none of the pithy passion and “pregnant brevity”’ 
of Chatham’s oratorical sword-thrusts; it has none of 
the smiling smoothness of Canning’s bright sentences. 
But it has the Saxon bone and sinew. It is lithe and 
muscular. It is straightforward and natural, but not 
rugged. It is scholarly, but never pedantic. His re- 
fined taste and natural good sense put him above the 
silly affectation of mere rhetorical glitter. He has es- 
caped that error which so many have allowed to pos- 
sess them—the error of confounding sound with sense, 
of reckoning eloquence by the number of syllables. His 
sentences have the easy, spontaneous flow of conversa- 
tion; yet they follow each other in close connection, 
hastening the progress of the thought and clearing the 
way for the apprehension. The power of his style is in- 
disputable. Even upon the printed page it retains its 
sovereignty. One has but to read it to feel its charm. 
The periods are often unskillfully turned. The clauses 
are sometimes loosely thrown together. ‘There is no 
dash or swiftness in the movement of the style. And 
yet, although you cannot always admire it from an ar- 
tistic point of view, you must always allow its power 
to engage the attention and to lead the thoughts. It 
is, undoubtedly, what he says, rather than his manner 
of saying it, that gives him his supreme control over his 
hearers and his readers. Yet we are fain to admit, that 
nobility of sentiment seems all the more noble, strength 
of principle all the stronger, and mastery of thought all 
the more masterful when conveyed in a style of such 
simplicity and clearness that not crystal itself could 
transmit the light of thought more cloudlessly. 

Mr. Bright never received a classical education. 
In breadth of scholarship he cannot, of course, be for 
a moment compared with Mr. Gladstone, with acrid 
Robert Lowe, with Sir William Harcourt, or with sev- 
eral of the more prominent and gifted Conservatives. 


52 COLLEGE AND STATE 


But his attainments as an English scholar are preémi- 
nent. Our own language has been the special object of 
his untiring study. The rich stores of our own Eng- 
lish literature he has explored with careful research. 
The Bible, Milton, and Shakespeare have been his most 
constant companions. And is not this fact pregnant 
with suggestion? From these noble sources have come, 
no doubt, his simplicity of creed, his earnest morality, 
his singleness of principle, his steadfastness of purpose, 
his breadth of sympathy. From the Bible his unhesitat- 
ing truthfulness and exalted sentiment; from Milton, 
his quiet, brave integrity; from Shakespeare, his knowl- 
edge of English human nature and his touching elo- 
quence! His character illustrates with peculiar apt- 
ness that striking remark of Richter’s: ‘Feelings come 
and go like light troops following the victory of the 
present; but principles, like troops of the line, are un- 
disturbed and stand fast.” 

As I have already said, Mr. Bright’s liberalism had 
attained its growth before he entered public life. His 
convictions were matured. His purposes were defi- 
nitely formed. He started, consequently, some forty 
years in advance of his age—and this fact exposed him 
to the flings of the unthinking—to the ridicule of the 
majority of his countrymen, who could not keep pace 
with his thoughts or sympathize with his designs. Like 
all who have dared to anticipate the growth of wisdom, 
or ventured to hasten on before the slow-advancing 
forces of public opinion, he was assailed with the bitter 
taunt of radicalism. ‘To this day you may hear the 
echoes of the fierce accusations which were long ago 
hurled at him by haughty, hating tories whose hatred 
was born of fear. You may hear heedless observers 
even now speak of John Bright as “‘the great radical.” 
His voice was raised at first, as now, always in behalf 
of the people, and men were quick to call him “agita- 
tor’ and “demagogue.”’ No one, however, who knows 
anything clearly about the actual history of events in 


COLLEGE AND STATE 53 


England since the formation of the Anti-Corn-Law 
League can now seriously entertain any other opinion 
of Mr. Bright than that his statesmanship has been as 
consummate as his oratory. Take down a volume of 
his speeches and look over the table of subjects upon 
which he has most frequently and most powerfully 
spoken. He has identified himself with every enlight- 
ened and subsequently triumphant view of policy both 
at home and abroad. Free Jrade, an extended and 
purified suffrage, a just and liberal land system, a per- 
fected finance, a worthy, manly, Christian foreign and 
colonial policy—all have found in him a steady friend 
and an unwearied advocate. Look further than the in- 
dex to his speeches. Follow the lines of his eminently 
statesmanlike plans of administration—plans, almost 
all of which have now come to their full harvest—and 
then tell me if you do not find in these at once the seeds 
and fruits of an enlightened conservatism. ' Wisdom is 
always conservative. John Bright a demagogue and a 
radical! If constant and consistent support of the pol- 
icy dictated by a clear-sighted liberalism, if a strenuous 
and unyielding opposition to the encroachments of 
power, and the oppressions of prejudice, and the tyr- 
anny of wealth, be demagogy, then has he indeed been 
the chiefest of demagogues! If an early and clear recog- 
nition of those principles of administrative reform 
which have now received the sanction of law and the 
vindication of experience be radicalism, then has he in- 
deed been the fiercest of radicals. It is matter of dem- 
onstration that he has uniformly been found among the 
earliest and most ardent supporters of all those great 
measures which are now regarded as the most admir- 
able fruits of the legislation of Great Britain during the 
last forty years. And his view has gone still further. 
He has looked beyond the present even and has from 
the very beginning of his career been eager to urge and 
powerful to prove essential such a change in the laws 
regulating the tenure of English land as would remove 


54 COLLEGE AND STATE 


the unhappy restraints of primogeniture and facilitate 
the breaking up of the vast single estates which now 
damn England to agricultural stagnation—such a 
change as would make possible the creation of numer- 
ous small estates and the existence of a large and en- 
larging class of small land-owners—a yeomanry not less 
glorious than that of bright days of power long gone 
by: days when stout bowstrings sped victorious arrows 
on many a field of battle—a yeomanry such as would 
build up old England in strength, infuse new youth into 
her political system, and secure to her a fresh lease of 
power and influence. Such a change must come, if 
England is not to die: and its coming will be but a 
fresh vindication of John Bright’s political prescience 
and far-reaching statesmanship. He is always pressing 
on to those great reforms which he knows the future 
must bring forth. 

Well, his countrymen are tardily coming to under- 
stand Mr. Bright. Now that they have come to think 
in most points as he has all his life been thinking, they 
cannot well help understanding him. He has been 
translated into their own thoughts and desires. ‘The 
‘Times’? newspaper, for many years his most uncom- 
promising foe and loudest denouncer, has now much 
generous praise for the man and much genuine respect 
for his opinions. But it exclaims with impatient self- 
complacency, that he is still bigoted, intolerant of 
everything that savors of opposition to the hitherto tri- 
umphant progress of liberal ideas! He cannot, it com- 
plains, give his opponents their due meed of credit and 
praise. He can see nothing good in whatsoever comes 
from the Conservative party. The ‘“Times” is not 
far wrong. Mr. Bright is positive and obstinate in 
his opposition to the policy of the present conservative 
government—to the Beaconsfieldism of these later 
days of brilliant failure abroad. ‘Tolerance is an admir- 
able intellectual gift: but it is of little worth in politics. 
Politics is a war of causes; a joust of principles. Gov- 


\ 


COLLEGE AND STATE 55 


ernment is too serious a matter to admit of meaningless 
courtesies. In this grand contestation of warring prin- 
ciples he who doubts is a laggard and an impotent. 
Shall we condemn the statesman because in this intense 
strife, in which he fights, not for empty formulas or un- 
practical speculations, but for the triumph of those 
principles which are in his eyes vitally essential to the 
welfare of the State in whose service he is spending and 
being spent—because in the very heat of this battle he 
does not stop to weigh out careful justice to his foe? He 
grants him all the privileges, he extends to him all the 
courtesies, of war. He acknowledges, it may be, his 
integrity of character and his uprightness of purpose. 
But is he to stultify himself by praising that against 
which he vehemently protests and strenuously fights ? 
Absolute identity with one’s cause is the first and great 
condition of successful leadership. It is that which 
makes the statesman’s plans clear-cut and decisive, his 
purposes unhesitating—it is that which’ makes him a 
leader of States and a maker of history. I would not 
for a moment be understood as seeking to lend any color 
of justification to that most humiliating and degrading 
precept, ‘Party, right or wrong.” ‘This is the maxim 
of knaves, or of fools. The idea J would press upon you 
is as far separated from this as is the east from the 
west. I would urge that entire identity with the cause 
—with the principle—you espouse wherein alone abide 
strength and the possibility of success. Party? What 
is it? It is only a convenient—it may be an accidental 
—union of those who hold certain great leading princi- 
ples in common. It is a mere outward sign of agree- 
ment. Is it the party, then, to which men of thought 
owe and pay allegiance? No. It is to the principles, 
of which party is the embodiment. ‘The man, therefore, 
who adheres to any party after it has ceased to avow 
the principles which to him are dear and in his eyes 
are vital; the man who follows the leadings of a party 
which seems to him to be going wrong, is acting a lie, 


56 COLLEGE AND STATE 


and has lost either his wit or his virtue. With wicked 
folly such as this Mr. Bright most assuredly cannot 
be charged. Never until very recent years has he ac- 
knowledged fealty to either of the great parties which 
divide English public opinion. Hitherto he has him- 
self led a small detached party of progress. Only 
within the last few years has he announced his adher- 
ence to the Liberal party. That great party has come 
to adopt all the greater of those principles whose pro- 
motion has been his life-work—and now that his 
principles are its principles, he is a Liberal. 

I have not attempted to sketch the career of John 
Bright. I have advisedly avoided doing so—not only 
because the materials for such a sketch are meagre 
and insufficient, but also because such a sketch would 
involve a review of all the political movements that 
have stirred England since 1840—a review which might 
prove tedious and would certainly too far trespass upon 
your patience. I have sought simply to display the 
more conspicuous traits of his character: to represent 
him as possessing in an eminent degree those qualities 
of eloquence and single-minded devotion which are the 
only lasting powers in the warfare of politics: such 
qualities as the great statesmen of our Revolution so 
gloriously exemplified: such qualities as Webster and 
Calhoun so nobly illustrated. 

But I am conscious that there is one point at which 
Mr. Bright may seem to you to stand in need of de- 
fence. He was from the very first a resolute opponent 
of the cause of the Southern Confederacy. Will you 
think that J am undertaking an invidious task, if I en- 
deavor to justify him in that opposition? I yield to no 
one precedence in love for the South. But because I 
love the South, I rejoice in the failure of the Confed- 
eracy. Suppose that secession had been accomplished? 
Conceive of this Union as divided into two separate and 
independent sovereignties! To the seaports of her 
northern neighbor the Southern Confederacy could have 


COLLEGE AND STATE Ui) 


offered no equals; with her industries she could have 
maintained no rivalry; to her resources she could have 
supplied no parallel. The perpetuation of slavery 
would, beyond all question, have wrecked our agricul- 
tural and commercial interests, at the same time that it 
supplied a fruitful source of irritation abroad and agi- 
tation within. We cannot conceal from ourselves the 
fact that slavery was enervating our Southern society 
and exhausting to Southern energies. We cannot con- 
ceal from ourselves the fact that the Northern union 
would have continued stronger than we, and always 
ready to use her strength to compass our destruction. 
With this double certainty, then, of weakness and dan- 
ger, our future would have been more than dark—it 
would have been inevitably and overwhelmingly disas- 
trous. Even the damnable cruelty and folly of recon- 
struction was to be preferred to helpless independence. 
All this I can see at the same time that I recognize and 
pay loving tribute to the virtues of the leaders of seces- 
sion, to the purity of their purposes, to the righteous- 
ness of the cause which they thought they were promot- 
ing—and to the immortal courage of the soldiers of the 
Confederacy. But Mr. Bright viewed the struggle as 
a foreigner. He was not intimately enough acquainted 
with the facts of our national history or with the orig- 
inal structure of our national government to see clearly 
the force or the justice of the doctrine of States Rights. 
That doctrine to him appeared a mere subtlety—a mere 
word-quibble. He saw and appreciated only the gen- 
eral features of the struggle. Its object was none other 
than the severance of a union which he saw was essen- 
tial to the prosperity of the South no less, nay, even 
more, than to the progress of the North—its severance 
for the avowed purpose of perpetuating an institution 
which we now acknowledge to have been opposed to 
the highest interests of society. Surely we cannot say 
that he erred in withstanding a suicidal course such as 
this. However much he may have mistaken the pur- 


58 COLLEGE AND STATE 


poses of secession and the characters of its leaders—and 
he did sadly mistake these—he at least saw what we 
now see to have been to our truest interest; and no 
one who will examine his public utterances on the sub- 
ject can fail to be convinced that he opposed the efforts 
of the Confederacy for the sake of the South, no less 
than for that of the North. He was a friend of the 
Union, not a partisan of the abolitionists. When others 
were predicting the destruction of the Union he ex- 
claimed in sudden eloquence: “‘I cannot believe, for my 
part, that such a fate will befall that fair land, stricken 
though it now is with the ravages of war. I cannot 
believe, for my part, that civilization, in its journey 
with the sun, will sink into endless night in order to 
gratify the ambition of the leaders of this revolt, who 
seek to ‘wade through slaughter to a throne, and shut 
the gates on mercy to mankind.’ I have another and 
far brighter vision before my gaze. It may be but a 
vision; but I will cherish it. I see one people, and one 
language, and one law, and one faith over all that wide 
continent, the home of freedom, and a refuge for the 
oppressed of every race and of every clime.’”’ Have 
we not abundant reason to thank God that this happy 
vision has been realized; that union still binds us to- 
gether in strength, and that the fresh promptings of 
brotherly love are leading us on to a still closer union 
in which all that is dark in the past shall be forgotten, 
all that was wrong forgiven, and the future shall be 
ripe with promise of achievements as yet unequalled? 

I am fully aware that I have laid myself open to 
the charge of having pronounced an eulogy upon John 
Bright. I have not stopped to display those small 
faults of temper and those minor deflections from prin- 
ciple which mar his life as like faults mar every human 
life. I have allowed myself to believe that these things 
may be left out of our estimate of the great orator 
and statesman without violence to justice or infidelity 
to truth. I have ventured to utter the few poor sen- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 59 


tences and inadequate thoughts to which you have been 
so indulgent as to listen, with this single intent: that 
the unhesitating truthfulness, the exalted sentiment, the 
quiet, brave integrity, the broad sympathy, the sincere 
purpose, and the splendid daring of devotion which 
seem to adorn the character of John Bright may be 
to you as, I trust, they have been in some sort to my- 
self, a pattern and an inspiration. ‘The lesson of his 
life is not far to seek or hard to learn. It is, that duty 
lies wheresoever truth directs us; that statesmanship 
consists, not in the cultivation and practice of the arts 
of intrigue, nor in the pursuit of all the crooked intrica- 
cies of the paths of party management, but in the life- 
long endeavor to lead first the attention and then the 
will of the people to the acceptance of truth in its ap- 
plications to the problems of government; that not the 
adornments of rhetoric, but an absorbing love for jus- 
tice and truth and a consuming, passionate devotion 
to principle are the body and soul of eloquence; that 
complete identification with some worthy cause is the 
first and great prerequisite of abiding success. Such are 
the crowning ornaments of the character of him in 
whom the elements are so mixed “that Nature might 
stand up and say to all the world, This was a man.” 
Such are the gifts and graces we must foster; such is the 
panoply of moral strength we must wear—we who are 
the builders of our country’s future—if we are to pre- 
serve our institutions from the consuming rusts of cor- 
ruption, to shield our liberties from the designs of 
enemies within the gates, and to set our faces towards 
the accomplishment of that exalted destiny which has 
been the happiest, brightest dream of generations lately 
passed away, and which may, we still may trust, be the 
crowning experience of generations soon to wake. 


THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN 
AMERICA 


WOODROW WILSON ON THE NEGATIVE OF A DEBATE ON 
THE QUERY: “IS THE ROMAN CATHOLIC ELEMENT 
IN THE UNITED STATES A MENACE TO AMERICAN 
INSTITUTIONS ?”? FROM THE “‘UNIVERSITY OF VIR- 
GINIA MAGAZINE,” APRIL, 1880, PP. 448-450. 


M R. BRUCE having concluded, the Secretary read 
the first gentleman’s name on the negative, and 
Mr. Wilson came forward to reply to the argument of 
Mr. Bruce as well as to open for the negative. 

Mr. Wilson said that this was a discussion which 
called in question the vitality of Anglo-Saxon institu- 
tions; of institutions which had stood the tests of cen- 
turies. ‘The object of the opposite side (the affirmative) 
was to prove “‘that it is in the power, as, in their opin- 
ion, it is in the desire of the Jesuits of the country 
to overturn’”’ these institutions which have so long stood 
against all assailing forces. In this debate we should, 
he said, have nothing to do with Roman Catholicism 
as a religion: we were to deal with it as a policy. He 
maintained that its political ascendancy over Anglo- 
Saxon peoples was made violently improbable by all 
teachings of history. He entered into a brief sketch 
of the history of Roman Catholic dominion, showing 
how in the past it had been bounded by the Rhine and 
the Weser, never having found firm rootage among the 
German races. ‘“‘Where Roman generals had found 
abiding victory impossible, Romish priests found en- 
during success scarcely less impracticable.” The priestly 
polity had gained no permanent foothold in Northern 
Germany, and had been predominant as a political 

60 


COLLEGE AND STATE 61 


power in England whither the sturdy races of North 
Germany had migrated, only until the breaking away of 
the feudal system and the full growth of the national 
spirit. [he exemption of the Teutonic races from 
papal dominion had, he said, been no mystery. ‘Their 
very natures, their most characteristic institutions, were 
utterly incompatible with the rule of Rome. The Rom- 
ish Church could, he continued, maintain its supremacy 
only over those nations whose governments were cen- 
tralized, and where the seat of power could be success- 
fully won and held. As an example he adduced France, 
which had been under the Romish yoke until it had put 
on habits of self-government. He recounted the man- 
ner in which Romanism had been hunted from self-gov- 
erned England, and asked if the success of papal aggres- 
sion was to be greater here in America where self-gov- 
ernment had obtained its highest development? This 
question was, he declared, answered by Dr. Brownson, 
an eminent Roman Catholic of New England, who had 
admitted the teachings of his church to be utterly in- 
compatible with American civilization, and its success 
a return to second childhood; by Mr. Cartwright, who 
had shown that all the governments of Europe were ar- 
raying themselves against the Society of Jesus; by Lord 
John Russell, who had shown how all the nations of 
the Continent had rejected the doctrines of the Sylla- 
bus; by the Roman Catholic bishops of the United 
States who had protested against the claim of infalli- 
bility and temporal power, asking “how they are going 
to live under the free constitution of their Republic and 
maintain their position of equality with their fellow- 
citizens after committing themselves” to these princi- 
ples; and by the leaders of the Liberal Catholics who 
were raising the standard of revolt within the church’s 
own pale. ‘These were, he said, the teachings of the 
past and the signs of the present: but the question was 
(Mr. Wilson said) one entirely of the future. The 
dangers of the situation are, he was free to admit, very 


62 COLLEGE AND STATE 


grave: the aggressive claims of the Papal authorities 
no one can deny—and they had, as Mr. Gladstone had 
so well shown, grown and accumulated since the Middle 
Ages. All the proofs of insolent pretensions heaped up 
by the other side he fully allowed: their premises were 
unimpeachable but their conclusions utterly unwarrant- 
able. The question was whether America was to be 
Romanized or Rome Americanized? He had shown the 
answer of the past: that of the present was no less 
satisfactory and conclusive. In proof of this he quoted 
several exceedingly striking cases in which the pre- 
tensions of the Romish authorities to the control of 
civil affairs by interference with the civil rights of Rom- 
ish communicants had been summarily met and punished 
in the law courts of several States. ‘These were the 
lessons of the law that had met the priestly powers at 
every turn. They were hedged about with the courts of 
law and told so far shall thou go and no step further. 
Such were the corroborations of the past which gave 
confidence to American statesmen and meaning to the 
opposition of American Roman Catholics to the aggres- 
sions of the Papal See. He did not anticipate the vic- 
tory of Rome because the danger was proclaimed and 
we forearmed; because of the historical prejudices 
against Roman Catholic authority which were peculiar 
to our race; because of our spreading and enlarging and 
strengthening common-school system which is throw- 
ing about us the safeguards of enlightenment; because 
of the unassailable defences of self-government. Our 
liberties are safe until the memories and experiences of 
the past are blotted out and the Mayflower with its band 
of pilgrims forgotten; until our public-school system 
has fallen into decay and the nation into ignorance; un- 
til legislators have resigned their functions to ecclesiasti- 
cal powers and their prerogatives to priests. 


MR. GLADSTONE: A CHARACTER SKETCH 


THIS ARTICLE SIGNED ‘ATTICUS’? WAS PUBLISHED IN 
THE “‘UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA MAGAZINE,” APRIL, 
1880, VOL. XIX, PP. 401-426. ON THE PRECEDING 
PAGE OF THE MAGAZINE, WHICH GIVES THE TABLE 
OF CONTENTS, ‘“‘BY WOODROW WILSON”’ IS INSERTED 
OPPOSITE THE TITLE ‘MR. GLADSTONE : CHARACTER 
SKETCH.” 


ee is something passing strange in the pre- 
sumption of those who undertake to write the 
biographies of living men; and yet one cannot help 
admiring their audacity and thanking them for their 
doing. For there is an indescribable charm about such 
works. Our interest in the characters and careers of 
men who have, so to speak, shared our times with us, 
and who are still active forces in the world, is naturally 
livelier than those from whom we are separated by 
long spaces of time, whom historians have canonized, 
and whose memory, even in the thoughts of the vast 
majority of their own countrymen, is grown as dim as 
their biographies are dusty. [hese latter do not seem 
so nearly of our own flesh and blood. Our sympathy 
with men whose deeds are of the present moment, whose 
names are every day set in the newspapers, or vibrated 
along the wires with the news of the hour, is prompt; 
our curiosity concerning them and their doings is alert; 
our appetite for every bit of information regarding 
them is keen; and we devour what is written about them 
with a zest such as accompanies our perusal of few other 
books. 

In writing a biography of Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Barnet 
Smith has, therefore, accomplished a work which is 

63 


64 COLLEGE AND STATE 


both indiscreet and acceptable. In publishing a work 
which seems to be receiving the praise of critics of 
every type and temper, he appears to me to have proved 
at once his intrepidity, his indelicacy, and his shrewd 
appreciation of the public taste. I have not yet been 
able to obtain a copy of Mr. Smith’s book; but, follow- 
ing afar off the example of Gibbon, who represents him- 
self as always, before opening any book which he was 
about to read, sitting himself down to write all that 
he knew and thought about the subject of which it 
treated, and that also of Mr. John Morley, who, him- 
self in imitation of Gibbon, prepared his mind for the 
perusal of Trevelyan’s Life of Macaulay by writing 
his admirable essay on the character and genius of the 
brilliant historian, I sit down to formulate the few 
crude impressions which have been made upon my mind 
by the character and career of the great member for 
Midlothian. 

Every one is, of course, more or less familiar with 
the principal events of Mr. Gladstone’s life. Rumors, 
at least, of so large a career must have found their way 
to every corner of the world where any news is ever 
allowed to come. One could hardly avoid knowing the 
main outlines of a life which has filled and is filling so 
large a space in the history of so great a nation as our 
kinsmen beyond the sea. And news of Mr. Gladstone 
has long been peculiarly abundant. Even the editors 
of country newspapers, in displaying to their admiring 
readers the political situation of England, with all the 
temerity of ignorance and all the wordy reserve of those 
who are under the driving necessity of filling space with- 
out saying anything, handle his name with careless fa- 
miliarity. His fame has introduced him into the pages 
of a novel, even, where his name has, doubtless, smiled 
to find itself. 

Mr. Gladstone has himself done much to acquaint 
the whole English-speaking world with his thoughts and 
purposes. Literary labors have filled all the intervals 


COLLEGE AND STATE 65 


of his active work in Parliament and on the hustings. 
He has written almost as incessantly as he has spoken— 
has written not only upon themes political, but upon 
problems of physics, subtle questions of literary criti- 
cism, debatable church dogmas, clouded ecclesiastical 
history, and mooted matters of ethics as well. He has 
spread all the lineaments of his mind upon printed pages. 
One might, I suppose, trace all the principal steps of 
his mental progress in his published writings, beginning 
with the essay on Church and State and coming down 
to his latest contribution to the discussion of the bor- 
ough franchise. For through all these writings run sin- 
cerity and candor, like the outcroppings of veins of 
precious ore. He never clouds his convictions with 
vague expressions. No one is more fearless than he 
in emphasizing the variance between the mature liber- 
alism of his age and the idealistic toryism of his youth. 
And it is just this transparent candor and thoroughgoing 
good faith that make what he has written so valuable 
an aid in the study of his character. 

His occasional and miscellaneous writings have re- 
cently been collected and published in a set of neat little 
volumes entitled ‘Gleanings of Past Years.’’ The pub- 
lication of a series of esays from the pen of a great 
living statesman would under any circumstances be a 
notable event in the literary world. We turn to the 
perusal of such writings with the eagerness and zeal 
which naturally spring from the interest we have learned 
to feel in their author as we have watched his conspicu- 
ous career and traced his ruling influence in the counsels 
of his country. And, indeed, Mr. Gladstone’s essays 
are not of such a character as to win very wide popu- 
larity entirely on their own intrinsic merits. They bor- 
row greatness from the hand that wrought them. Mr. 
Gladstone’s written style is ponderous. It has little 
of that bright glow which so lights up and beautifies 
his speeches; there is none of the swift strength and 
conquering dash which are the power of his oratory. 


66 COLLEGE AND STATE 


It is at once a curious and an instructive fact to stu- 
dents of many of the greater orators, that the mastery 
of thought, of expression, and of method which makes 
their onset so terrible and their influence so imperial 
on the platform or in the Senate, deserts them in the 
closet; and they take up their pens only to multiply stiff 
phrases and awkward periods. That Mr. Gladstone 
is not without power even in the use of the pen is abun- 
dantly proven by the moving and moulding influence of 
his great political pamphlets; and these recently col- 
lected literary miscellanies have much strength both of 
thought and of rhetoric. But, as compared with his 
speeches, they seem of small value; and we are, there- 
fore, inclined at first to think that they might, without 
risk of injustice, be neglected in our estimate of his 
intellectual gifts. They are as immeasurably inferior 
to his many masterful speeches in the House of Com- 
mons as is Charles Fox’s “History of England” to his 
great argument on the Westminster Scrutiny. 

Still, their value as contributions to the question to 
which they relate is unquestionable; and their value as 
contributions to his mental history is, as I have already 
intimated, inestimable. We would by no means be 
willing to lose even these lesser works of the greatest 
English Liberal. They throw a side light upon his 
character which adds much to its distinctness. His char- 
acter is one of such grand proportions, of so complex 
a structure, and of so unique a build that we cannot fully 
appreciate it until we have viewed it from both sides, 
and in all lights. And I do not know of any one among 
modern statesmen whose character is worthier of the 
study and the imitation of the young men of a free 
country than is Mr. Gladstone’s. His life has been one 
continuous advance, not towards power only—fools 
may be powerful; knaves sometimes rule by the knack 
of their knavery—but towards truth also the while. 

William Ewart Gladstone was born in Liverpool 
in the year 1809. He comes of sturdy Scotch stock; 


COLLEGE AND STATE 67 


and his mind and body alike are cast out of strong 
Scotch stuff. We can easily imagine what sort of youth 
his was. He must have been a sober, thoughtful boy, 
full of spirits without being boisterous; eager and im- 
petuous without being imperious; a leader in sport as 
in study; straightforward in everything, even in his ha- 
treds; half-souled in nothing, not even in his faults. He 
is old now; he is turned of seventy, and these are still 
the leading traits of his character—traits which bear 
the ratification of a long and intensely-lived life; which 
may almost be said to bear the seal of completion. For 
his active life may reasonably be thought to be rapidly 
nearing its close. And it is because we thus stand near 
his grave that we may venture an estimate of his char- 
acter. The few years that remain to him cannot mate- 
rially change a character which has been a-making for 
seventy years of busy living. 

And just here we seem to have happened upon the 
chiefest and most instructive peculiarity of his career: 
his convictions have steadily grown towards truth, as 
the flower grows towards the sun; his character has de- 
veloped and gathered strength year by year and day 
by day, slowly, as the oak waxes great and strong. He 
has all his life been a-making. His character will not 
be entirely complete until death has placed the capstone. 

It has been remarked as an interesting circumstance 
that the county Lancashire has produced three of the 
most eminent English statesmen of later years, the late 
Earl Derby, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Bright; and it 
may, further, prove worthy of at least a passing notice 
that these three men have each typified in his career 
a prominent phase of later political history. Lord 
Derby was a living type of that reaction against liber- 
alism which followed upon the accomplishment of the 
first decisive measures of parliamentary reform and 
the repeal of the Corn Laws. Sprung from a family 
all of whose traditions were strongly Whig, he was 
among the first to join the revolt against triumphant 


68 COLLEGE AND STATE 


Whigism. Mr. Gladstone’s career from its first chap- 
ter to its last, illustrates the breaking away of the 
older forms of English Conservatism and the advance 
of English public opinion to higher plains of principle 
and freer and more rational methods of policy. In his 
youth an unbending tory, he stands in his old age in 
the forefront of liberalism. Mr. Bright, in his freedom 
of faculty, his fearless spirit of inquiry, and his creed of 
common-sense, is a conspicuous type of the spirit of the 
England of to-day. 

Perhaps the most vital characteristic of Mr. Glad- 
stone’s nature is his keen poetical sensibility. By poeti- 
cal sensibility I do not mean an imaginativeness which 
clothes all the common concerns of life with poetical 
forms or weds the mind to those things which are pic- 
turesque rather than to matters of practical business, 
to fancies rather than to the interests of ordinary every- 
day life, to images rather than to fertile purposes. I 
mean, rather, breadth of sympathy such as enables its 
possessor to take in the broader as well as the pettier 
concerns of life, with unconscious ease of apprehension 
and unfailing precision of judgment; to identify himself 
with interests far removed from the walks of his own 
life; to throw himself, as if by instinct, on that side of 
every public question which, in the face of present 
doubts, is in the long run to prove the side of wisdom 
and of clear-sighted policy; such a sympathy as makes 
a knowledge of men in him an intuition instead of an 
experience. Such a faculty is preéminently poetical, 
raising men above experience, as it seems to do, and 
enabling them to guide the policy of a government, 
almost before they can be truly said to have learned 
to manage the affairs of their own households. And 
yet it is quite as evidently an intensely practical faculty. 
Great statesmen seem to direct and rule by a sort of 
power to put themselves in the place of the nation over 
whom they are set, and may thus be said to possess 
the souls of poets at the same time that they display 


COLLEGE AND STATE 69 


the coarser sense and the more vulgar sagacity of prac- 
tical men of business. 

Had Mr. Gladstone not been endowed with these 
peculiarities of disposition, he would in all probability 
have remained unknown to the world, obscurely in- 
trenched behind the unqualified dogmas of his early 
toryism, whence no one in the hurry of the liberal 
triumphs which have since been accomplished would 
have troubled himself to dislodge him. His early edu- 
cation was such, one would have thought, as totally 
to unfit him for active participation in public affairs. 
Six years he had spent at Eton in the study of Horace, 
Virgil and Homer. By the latter all the poetical depths 
of his nature were strongly stirred. In the superb 
imagery of the blind bard, and in his vigorous sympa- 
thy with man and with nature, young Gladstone’s mind 
found what was but fuel to its own flames. From 
Eton he went to Oxford and there passed through fur- 
ther drill in the classics and the abstract mathematics. 
From Oxford he went almost immediately to Parlia- 
ment. He entered public life with no experience but 
in poetical feeling and in abstract thought, and with 
no opinions but those of stubborn conservatism in which 
he had from his early youth been schooled by his 
father. He launched himself in public life by writing 
a pamphlet which was at once a manifestation of his 
poetical feeling and a vindication of his traditionary 
tory principles. In this pamphlet he sought to bolster 
up the union of Church and State by founding it upon 
a divine foreordination which had constituted the State 
a moral being, in conscience bound to uphold the true 
faith by the strength of its temporal arm and to aid 
in the dissemination of the verities of the true religion 
by the sanction of its laws and the active codperation 
of its ministers. But he did not allow himself to remain 
long bound by the shackles which he had forged for 
himself, and for all who might be ready to follow him, 
in his argument on Church and State. He had com- 


70 COLLEGE AND STATE 


menced life with predilections simply, not with intelli- 
gent convictions. His first contact with the cooler atmos- 
phere of practical politics, however, roused him to a 
new activity. His idealistic theories of state action were 
dispelled by the necessity for resolving the actual prob- 
lems of administration as mists are chased from the 
valleys by the sun. 

Mr. Gladstone’s mind embodies in strange, and on 
the whole grand, combination the faculty of poetic sym- 
pathy which I have already indicated and the colder 
qualities of reason. His reason leads and his catholic 
sympathy impels. When once contact with the practical 
problems of government had begun to break away the 
foundations of his early ardent, air-built theories, the 
progress of transition was rapid and certain. He came 
gradually to allow full credit to the severe and inexora- 
ble processes of his keenly logical mind. And as soon 
as his mind was awakened his sympathetic affections 
enlisted his whole nature in the search after truth, fusing 
his reasonings and communicating their heat to the 
powers of his will. He was fairly launched on his voy- 
age towards the farthest waters of liberalism. His fu- 
ture course was inevitable. Henceforward he became 
the embodiment of the liberal tendencies of his nation. 

The stages of this development are easy to trace. 
As long as Mr. Gladstone remained a “private mem- 
ber” of the House of Commons, speaking from the back 
benches, unemployed in solving the practical problems 
of actual administration, left to the guidance of his un- 
corrected, untutored theories, he continued wedded to 
his speculative opinions. For nine years, from 1832 to 
1841, he stood steadily by that transcendental theory 
of government which, in 1838, he published to the 
world in his pamphlet on Church and State. For a few 
months in 1834 he had held office as under-secretary 
for the colonies in the short-lived, makeshift ministry 
of Sir Robert Peel. But this short experience has not 
been sufficient to break in upon his speculations. During 


COLLEGE AND STATE 71 


this period of preparation, we find him withstanding 
with his usual vehement determination all attacks on 
the property of the Irish Church, setting his face sternly 
against the abolition of religious tests in the Universi- 
ties, and opposing with consistent zeal the removal of 
the civil disabilities of the Jews. Whenever his care- 
fully avowed opinions were put to the test, he was 
ready to uphold them to the last iota. 

But in 1841 he was called to the duties of active 
administration, taking office under Sir Robert Peel, 
first as Vice-President and, later, as President of the 
Board of Trade. He was rudely shaken from his rev- 
eries by the urgent duties and active business of his 
official trust. ‘The education of his youth—the educa- 
tion of the schools—was corrected by the education of 
hard work. The student was awakened to the actual 
direction of practical affairs. His abstract theories 
broke at once and completely down. Actual contact 
with urgent, crowding questions of practical legislation 
roused his mind from its ideal fancies and addressed 
it to the real work of government. Among the meas- 
ures introduced by the ministry of Sir Robert Peel were 
what are known as the Maynooth College grant and 
the Queen’s University Bill. The Maynooth Bill pro- 
posed to add to the grant which had already been 
made to the Roman Catholic College of Maynooth, an 
institution founded specially for the education of young 
men for the Roman Catholic priesthood; the Queen’s 
University Bill embraced a scheme for “establishing in 
Ireland three colleges, one in Cork, the second in Bel- 
fast and the third in Galway, and to affiliate these to a 
new University to be called the ‘Queen’s University in 
Ireland.’ ‘The teaching in these colleges was to be 
purely secular.”” Manifestly both these measures were 
utterly incompatible with the pronounced convictions 
of the young President of the Board of Trade. ‘The 
first proposed to extend the aid of the State to the 
maintenance of a religion which was not its own—which 


72 COLLEGE AND STATE 


had for generations been at open enmity with that 
Church which he had declared it to be the sacred duty 
of the State to cherish and maintain to the exclusion 
of every other; the second founded what the opponents 
of the scheme derisively denominated ‘‘godless colleges” 
under the care and sanction of public law. ‘The first 
gave support to an alien church; the second excluded 
all religion from a State institution. Upon the intro- 
duction of these measures into Parliament, Mr. Glad- 
stone immediately resigned his position in the Cabi- 
net. But he supported both bills. He had resigned 
not because he could not give his assent to the actions 
of his colleagues, but because he wished his change of 
opinion to be raised above all suspicion of interested 
motives. He wished to proclaim his change of ground 
and at the same time to demonstrate his own sincerity. 
He would not have it thought that his convictions were 
altered from love of office. He was convinced, not se- 
duced. ‘The fact that his roused faculties had discov- 
ered to him the fact that his former position was no 
longer tenable. He found his principles irreconcilably 
at war with all the stronger tendencies, with all the 
healthier impulses of the day. And he quickly and 
bravely acknowledged the discovery. ‘He was not,” 
he protested, “‘to fetter his judgment as a member of 
Parliament by a deference to abstract theories.”” Upon 
this ground his mind began its searching and fearless 
examination of all the principles he had hitherto con- 
fessed. Once enlisted in this pursuit of truth his eager 
mind found it impossible to stop at half measures. He 
cut himself loose, not suddenly, but surely, from the 
preconceived prejudices of his inexperienced years and 
addressed himself to the task of rational resolution of 
the problems of government. As far as I can see, the 
transition was a short one. His liberalism matured and 
strengthened rapidly. He at once placed himself at 
the side of those men against whom he had heretofore 
contended. His conversion was not an isolated one. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 73 


He left the Conservative ranks with his great master, 
Sir Robert Peel. He had joined Peel in dealing the 
blow of Free Trade at the tories; and both men alike 
now fell under the hatred of the “betrayed” party. Their 
companionship in liberalism would probably have been 
continued had not death put a sudden period to the 
life of the master, and left the pupil to the devices of 
his own mind. 

Mr. Gladstone exhibited at every turn his changed 
views. In 1841 he strenuously opposed the Ecclesiasti- 
cal Titles Bill, which forbade Roman Catholic Bishops 
to assume local titles within the kingdom, as a silly act 
of mere intolerance. In 1852 he took office, as Chan- 
cellor of the Exchequer, in the Aberdeen Coalition min- 
istry, sitting beside Russell and Palmerston. Later, 
from 1860-1866, he devoted his magnificent financial 
talents to the service of a thoroughgoing Liberal ad- 
ministration, carrying out the economical policy of the 
party whose principles had now finally enlisted him in 
its service, in a series of budgets unrivalled in their dis- 
play of knowledge and ability. And finally, within our 
own easy recollection, from November, 1868, to Febru- 
ary, 1874, he, as Prime Minister, led Parliament 
through that period of magnificent legislation during 
which the Irish Church was disestablished; the tenure 
of Irish land was made freer and juster; cheap educa- 
tion was secured to all the population of the kingdom; 
purchase in the army, with all its attendant abuses and 
corruption, was abolished; the endowed schools were 
reformed and reconstructed; religious tests were done 
finally away with at the universities! and all the serious 
complications of foreign affairs were amicably and 
honorably resolved—a period which enthusiastic liber- 
als have, not without some show of truth, exultingly 
called the ‘‘golden period” of English liberalism. 

Many persons would be inclined to reckon his an 
inconsistent course. I cannot so regard it. His career 
seems to me to have been what it has been principally 


74 COLLEGE AND STATE 


because of the unhesitating logic of his mind and the 
simple candor of his nature. When he had been roused 
from the dreams and speculations of his student mood, 
and had begun to think and act in the temper of a 
practical man of business, his keen perceptions, his quiet 
determination, and his resolute conscientiousness irre- 
sistibly urged him to the acceptance of the farthest con- 
clusions of his reason. Few men stand in their old age 
where they stood in their youth. The untested opinions 
of the early life do not always or often stand the trial 
of experience. In public life especially, so varied and 
varying are the conditions of government, their pur- 
poses must be trimmed to possibilities. Men who have 
early given their undivided attention to practical affairs 
and who enter public life, if they enter it at all, long 
after the temper and habits of the schools have worn 
off, are generally among the few who begin their career 
with fixed opinions and matured convictions, which no 
change of circumstance can alter, and no discourage- 
ment defeat. Such a man was Richard Cobden; such 
a man is John Bright. ‘The latter has passed through 
a long period of public service with unaltered views, 
and has lived to see his earliest avowed principles re- 
ceive the amplest vindication and the fullest ratification. 
And yet his career has in reality fewer elements of 
grandeur, no greater flavor of sincerity, and no more 
of the rigor of consistency than distinguish Mr. Glad- 
stone’s life. The contrast between these two men is a 
remarkable and instructive one. The resemblances be- 
tween their characters are equally interesting. Both are 
preéminent in eloquence; both are conspicuous for the 
noble sincerity and high-strung morality of their char- 
acters; both are engaged heart and soul in the pursuit 
of the highest interests of their country; and both find 
these interests wrapped up in the principles of the 
Liberal party which they lead. But, though they both 
now stand together, in close friendship and common 
leadership, they have reached their present position 


COLLEGE AND STATE 75 


by very different, widely separated, ways. Their minds 
are of different cast. Mr. Gladstone has reasoned his 
way to the light; Mr. Bright seems to have been born 
in the light. Mr. Bright began in practice, Mr. Glad- 
stone in study. Study has brightened and expanded Mr. 
Bright’s faculties; practice has collected and concen- 
trated and directed Mr. Gladstone’s powers. ‘The one 
is a man of intuitions, arriving at his conclusions ap- 
parently without the aid of laborious processes of ra- 
tiocination; the other is a man of large heart and larger 
reason, quickly and fearlessly, though carefully and cau- 
tiously, following the steps of his logic. The one has 
‘been all along advanced; the other, advancing. The 
one has led—led thought; the other has commanded— 
commanded legislatures and cabinets. 

The question of consistency is not a question of abso- 
lute fixedness of opinion. One can hardly help pitying 
one who is incapable of changing his opinions; though, 
of course, it is scarcely less dificult to withhold one’s 
admiration from that man who has all along adopted 
the conclusions of truth. It seems to me that right 
and truth are the proper standards in this matter. He 
who proves his mind so free from the shackles of preju- 
dice and the blinds of bigotry as to be ready at every 
turn to abandon its former positions of error or mis- 
take for the new positions of truth and right, and who, 
moreover, follows the leadings of his progressing con- 
victions without thought of turning back, is no less 
consistent—consistent with the true standards of con- 
sistency—than is he who has from the first occupied 
the advanced posts of inquiry whither the other has 
just arrived. If immutability of belief be the criterion 
of consistency, then let us taunt scientists with fickleness 
because their investigations have brought them far be- 
yond where they were, even within the short memory 
of men; let us sneer at all governments which are not 
despotisms; let us laugh at civilization because it did 
not stop in the darkness of the middle ages. 


76 COLLEGE AND STATE 


Our own century, though perhaps not so deeply 
scarred by revolutions as many of those which have pre- 
ceded it, has been richer than they in true political prog- 
ress. Old systems have been purified; new systems have 
been set up. Europe has already gone far towards the 
abandonment of her old despotisms. Austria and Hun- 
gary are struggling towards the full and final establish- 
ment of free institutions, based upon a limitation of 
royal power; Germany has vested in a freely elected 
representative body much real authority; France is ex- 
periencing for the first time in her history, and after 
many blind searchings for liberty, the blessings of a 
rational system of government, which, though defective 
in parts, is based upon well-tested principles; even the 
hideous outbreaks of violence by which Russian nihilism 
is disgracing itself are manifestations of a revolt against 
absolutism which has the germs of honorable patriotism 
in it. In England reform has made such rapid strides 
that the Conservatives of to-day stand about where the 
Liberals, or Whigs, of fifty years ago stood. Parlia- 
mentary representation has been thoroughly reformed; 
the suffrage has been extended as far as prudence per- 
mitted; the prerogatives of the Crown seem to have 
been finally hedged about with every safeguard that 
the most suspicious patriot could demand; commerce 
has been freed from harassing restrictions; in everything 
English statesmen seem to have turned their faces to- 
wards the light of practical wisdom instead of hiding 
them longer in the darkness of prejudice. And it is 
just this spirit of advance, this emancipation from the 
narrow views of policy which have heretofore too often 
influenced British legislation, which is, as I have al- 
ready said, typified in Mr. Gladstone’s career. Once 
an eloquent advocate of the union of Church and State, 
he has himself disestablished the Church of Ireland, 
and startled his countrymen with hints of the advisabil- 
ity and probable necessity of separating the Church of 
England from the Crown; at one time an unbending 


COLLEGE AND STATE 77 


tory, he has assisted in rudely breaking down some of 
the most cherished principles of the tory creed by the 
establishment of free trade; he has flung tolerance in 
their intolerant faces; he has overwhelmed their schemes 
of extended dominion by proving them plans for multi- 
plying the burdens of an already overburdened king- 
dom; he has laughed to scorn the doctrine that con- 
cessions to foreign powers when England is in the wrong 
are inconsistent with British dignity; that only arrogant 
pretensions are consistent with British prestige; that 
England is to interpose in behalf of tyranny and des- 
potism whenever Russia, or any other one of her ‘‘natu- 
ral enemies,” espouses the cause of self-government and 
freedom. And in all these things he has been true to 
his principles. Not even his bitterest foes have ever 
breathed any suspicion of his insincerity. His aim has 
always been to serve justice and truth, and in his search 
for these he has not hesitated or been ashamed to aban- 
don the crude theories of his youth for the more ra- 
tional principles to which the experience of his maturer 
years has brought him. 

It is hard satisfactorily to analyze such a character 
as Mr. Gladstone’s. Its structure is so complex that one 
is puzzled to know where its mainspring is to be found. 
His mind has all the indescribable attributes of genius, 
and consequently bafiles all investigation of its constitu- 
tion. Some clue to its qualities might be found in the 
subjects of study to which he has most constantly de- 
voted his attention. The poems of Homer, as they 
were the companions of his Eton days, have also been 
the objects of his life-long study. He has pondered 
nothing more thoroughly than the conceptions of the 
blind bard, whose creations are to him as real as though 
they were flesh and blood. He seems to have found ex- 
quisite enjoyment in exploring the recondite subtleties 
of the Greek language, and inexhaustible pleasure in the 
possession of that ‘‘golden key that could unlock the 
treasures of antiquity, of a musical and prolific lan- 


78 COLLEGE AND STATE 


guage tnat gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a 
body to the abstractions of philosophy.’ He has un- 
doubtedly found in this harmonious instrument of 
thought a spirit akin to his own. It is his power to give 
‘fa soul to the objects of sense’”’ that has made him one 
of the greatest financiers the world has produced; and 
it is his capacity for giving a body, not to the abstrac- 
tions of philosophy, but to the higher impulses of the 
English race that has given him his power on the plat- 
form and his preéminence in Parliament. 

It is only by indirect clues such as this that we can 
find our way to the secrets of a nature such as Mr. 
Gladstone’s. For the principal qualities of his mind 
are warrior qualities—the qualities which display them- 
selves in action. We know little clearly of the charac- 
ters of the great soldiers of history, save only their 
battle-field traits. It is what they did rather than what 
they were that constitutes their fame. So Mr. Glad- 
stone’s life has been eminently one of bold action, and 
it is by his deeds that we are obliged to read the char- 
acter of the doer. His mind is habitually militant, and 
all that he has written and said, save only his Homeric 
criticisms, has been written and said not so much to 
communicate thoughts as to urge arguments and impart 
purposes. His has been a greatness of deed, a greatness 
embodied in acts of Parliament and measured by epochs 
of national progress; a greatness of imperial adminis- 
trative talent and of sovereign constructive ability. Of 
course the greatness is in the man himself and it is 
his nature which thus towers above the ordinary level 
of mankind. It is the grandeur of the statesman that 
makes his statesmanship grand, just as, to liken the 
finite to the infinite, it is the sublimity of the divine 
power that gives grandeur to the works of nature. It 
is Mr. Gladstone’s lofty qualities of heart, his earnest 
and practical piety, and his magnificent gifts of intel- 
lect that lend distinguished merit to his acts of legisla- 
tion. But men find it hard to separate him from what 


COLLEGE AND STATE 79 


he has done just as they find it hard to know anything 
of Wellington but that he won Waterloo, or of Marl- 
borough than that he won Blenheim. And when one 
sits down, pen in hand, to write of the character of 
a great statesman his view is apt to be confined to vol- 
umes of statutes and minutes of parliamentary proceed- 
ings. This genius of acting is no more to be defined 
than it is to be acquired. And so far are we from 
being able to appreciate the nature of men from what 
we see them do in public, that we are surprised to learn 
that Macaulay had intense domestic affections and was 
capable of romping with children and of devoting him- 
self to the quiet, unpretentious offices of love in the serv- 
ice of his sister—that he did anything but entertain 
others with brilliant passages of conversation, bright, 
incisive essays, overflowing with information and keen 
criticism, and with picturesque history, full of para- 
dox tricked out in charming rhetoric. So far are we 
from being able to interpret the characters of men by 
the greater works of their hands, that we seem to see 
only the sterner, more practical side of Mr. Gladstone’s 
nature when we regard only his public acts, and find it 
next to impossible to conceive of him as calming his 
leisure moments by drawing forth soothing harmony 
from an organ, as busying his great mind, in intervals 
of rest, with the practical work of a farm—as doing 
anything but gravely deliberating upon the great affairs 
of national administration or passing busy nights in Par- 
liament in the eager contest of debate or the earnest 
work of legislation. 

If, because of the masterful success of his financial 
administration and the consummate ability of his gov- 
ernment, we do not wonder that his countrymen have 
accorded Mr. Gladstone a prominent place among the 
very first of English statesmen, still less can we be sur- 
prised, in view of his wonderful gifts, that he has won 
a place among the greatest orators. If the passionate 
intensity, which enters so largely into the texture of 


80 COLLEGE AND STATE 


his character, lends so much of force, so much brilliant 
boldness, to his plans of administration, what over- 
whelming power it must impart to his oratory! Passion 
is the pith of eloquence. Not the passion which hurries 
into extravagance, nor that which spends itself in ve- 
hement utterance and violent gesticulation, but that 
which stirs the soul with enthusiasm for the truth and 
zeal for its proclamation. It is this that marks the 
difference between the accomplished speaker and the 
consummate orator. ‘The difference lies not so much 
in the diversity of intellectual gift as in the texture 
of soul. Both England and America are full of good 
speakers. Every country where discussion holds a place 
as one of the chief factors of government and where 
the lecture platform and the electoral hustings, as well 
as the pulpit and the bar, afford ample opportunity 
for the cultivation and display of the art of public 
speech, can boast hosts of pleasing and popular speak- 
ers. But in the United States no man is now recog- 
nized as the greatest orator in the nation, no one has 
had to fall upon his shoulders the mantle of Henry, of 
Clay, or of Webster; and in England only two of a 
nation of lawyers and of public men are universally 
acknowledged to have had their lips touched with the 
fire of the highest eloquence. In this rare preéminence 
Mr. Bright and Mr. Gladstone stand alone, differing 
from other orators not in felicity of rhetoric, purity of 
diction, and mastery of thought, so much as in mental 
temper. As steel differs from steel in temper, so are 
the minds of these men of finer metal than those of 
their rivals in oratory. The instrument they use is not 
a keen rapier of wit, which can cut floating veils of 
fancy with delightful skill, or flash the sharp destruction 
of satire from its burnished blade—such are the tricks 
of Beaconsfield’s brilliant oratory; nor is it of the ordi- 
nary steel of striking rhetoric, sharp phrase, and keen 
argument—of such are the weapons which Robert Lowe 
and Sir William Harcourt employ. It is a two-edged 


COLLEGE AND STATE 81 


sword that can split fine hairs of distinction with no 
less precision than it can search out the heart of an 
opponent’s plea, that can make the dexterous passes 
of dialectic fence with the same readiness with which 
it can cleave the defences of prejudice. 

It is as an orator that Mr. Gladstone most forcibly 
appeals to our imaginations. He has certainly been 
one of the most prolific of English orators. The streams 
of his eloquence are perennial. His speeches extend 
their influence beyond the hour of their speaking, their 
charm beyond the tones of the speaker’s voice. They 
move when read only less than they moved when heard. 
Even when set in the cold and quiet print they seem 
full of life and warmth and vigor. When reading a 
report of one of his great arguments one seems to catch 
the spirit of the ‘‘cheers’”’ which break the column with 
their parentheses, and to hear echoed plaudits in his 
own heart. It is not every one, however, I imagine, 
that would enjoy a perusal of Mr. Gladstone’s speeches. 
A literary critic could scarcely commend their structure; 
tastes of super-refinement and exalted ideals would 
hardly find room for admiration of their plans. Theirs 
is not the beauty of form or of movement, of grace or 
of symmetry; but the beauty of grand proportions and 
of rugged strength—that beauty which approaches to 
grandeur: to a grandeur which is not the grandeur of 
art, but the grandeur of nature. To one who can enter 
into the spirit of that keen warfare between principles, 
the warfare of political discussion, there is real music 
in these speeches—more than in the measured beauty of 
Ruskin’s exquisite style or in the bolder strains of Can- 
ning’s ornate rhetoric. For one whose imagination is 
roused more quickly by the tread of armies and the 
strokes of the sword in battle than by the quiet loveli- 
ness of green fields or the majestic sweep of some silent 
river which does not rebel against its banks, these 
speeches must possess a powerful attraction. The prog- 
ress of Mr. Gladstone’s arguments is like the sweep- 


82 COLLEGE AND STATE 


ing flight of an eagle from crag to crag and summit 
to summit. 

The style of these speeches is peculiar—peculiarly 
vicious according to the judgment of some. Certainly 
it is not a style such as would provoke imitation. ‘The 
sentences, most of them, are long, clause being heaped 
on clause, parenthesis added to parenthesis, until the 
very skill of the orator in extricating himself success- 
fully and grammatically excites our wondering admira- 
tion. Their strength is a compound strength; the 
strength of accumulated force. Every now and then, 
however, the light and heat of these sentences are fo- 
cused in a single phrase: their meaning concentrated in 
one short period which must have struck the hearer like 
a sudden blow. And the meaning of the orator shines 
clearly through his most involved sentences. ‘They 
sometimes seem interminable, but they seldom seem ob- 
scure. They are powerful weapons in Mr. Gladstone’s 
hands; they could scarcely be handled by any other. 
Bruce’s sword was powerful to work destruction in 
Bruce’s hands; to others its weight would have been 
but a burden. I suppose that these massive sentences 
are the natural extemporaneous expression of a mind 
which is full to overflowing. 

But Mr. Gladstone’s spoken style is not uniform— 
not uniform even in its defects, still less in its beauties. 
His genius as an orator most conspicuously manifests 
itself in his power of adapting his style to the audience 
he is addressing. One day he is speaking to a meeting 
of the most intelligent and learned members of his con- 
stituency, and his style is one of measured calmness, his 
treatment following the leadings of a strict, though 
eloquent, logic. ‘The next day, perhaps, he meets the 
farmers of the countryside upon the hustings, and the 
style is changed. It is aflame with earnest persuasion 
and glowing with passionate sentiment. He is speak- 
ing like an Englishman to Englishmen, with eager pa- 
triotism and a fire of high resolve. He is convincing 


COLLEGE AND STATE 83 


his hearers by persuading them. ‘There is always, how- 
ever, whatever the audience he is addressing, the same 
foundation of conviction and the same transparency of 
truth. “Though the treatment be diverse, there is no 
diversity in the beliefs, no crookedness in the counsels, 
of the orator. ‘The soil may differ, now spread in calm 
beauty, now piled in great heights, but under all and 
supporting all are the primitive, unchanging granite 
veins of conviction. 

According to all accounts, the delivery of the orator 
is in keeping with the style of the orations, is chiefly 
marked by its power. ‘The personal appearance of the 
speaker strikes the eye. A London correspondent of 
the Philadelphia Press has thus happily described Mr. 
Gladstone as he looks since age has begun to creep upon 
him: ‘‘In personal appearance Mr. Gladstone is an ac- 
tive, lithe, muscular man, rather tall, and of well-pro- 
portioned frame. His face and figure have that clear- 
cut contour which generally indicates several generations 
of intellectual activity and personal leadership. * * * 
The face is scholarly, cultivated, its outlines boldly de- 
fined by the meagreness of muscle which distinguishes 
the intellectual athlete. ‘There is not an ounce of super- 
fluous flesh on it. The thin lip and well cut mouth and 
chin betoken firmness, determination, and endurance. 
Seventy summers have sat lightly on him, but the years 
have brought their blessing of rest, and his face in 
general wears the repose of strength and experience, 
strongly lined with the record of struggle and thought.” 
I do not suppose that photographs and engravings can 
convey any very faithful portraiture of such a face. 
Still all photographs of Mr. Gladstone display the same 
general cast of feature, and satisfy more or less precisely 
the description of the correspondent. It is altogether 
a remarkable face, and the features seem such as would 
be modified by every current of feeling. “The deep eye 
and quivering muscles answer to every tone of the mar- 
vellous voice. If Bright’s voice rings like a peal of 


84 COLLEGE AND STATE 


bells, Gladstone’s pierces like a trumpet call or thrills 
with tones like an organ’s. 

Upon the hustings Mr. Gladstone overwhelms op- 
position and seldom fails to compel victory. Once 
or twice he has had to meet vast assemblages of ex- 
cited and angered men on Blackheath, who greeted 
him with jeers and hisses; but never did he fail to 
change their jeers into cheers, their hisses into applause, 
their anger into enthusiasm, their enmity into support. 
At first his voice was raised in accents of conciliation 
which calmed the passions of his hearers as they rung 
out above all the fierce vociferations of excited hatred; 
at last the same voice’s calls of command and persuasion 
were borne aloft above the resounding echoes of re- 
doubled cheers. The exordium broke like harshest dis- 
cord on the ears of the listener; to the peroration their 
own approving cheers were the inspiring refrain. 

But it is in Parliament that Mr. Gladstone’s elo- 
quence is said to be most masterful. There his vic- 
tories have been unnumbered, his first triumph dating 
from that memorable night in November, 1852, which 
has so often been the theme of description; that night 
when first he was pitted against Disraeli in the direct 
combat of debate; that night on which, by one splendid 
leap, he attained to the highest achievements of elo- 
quence. The memory of that night must often recur 
to men who then sat in Parliament as among their most 
stirring recollections. It was an occasion of crisis. In 
February, 1852, the government of Lord John Rus- 
sell had been broken by the clash of factions in the 
House of Commons. The storms of 1847, when the 
great Free Trade victory had been won, had not yet 
cleared finally away, and Parliament was divided into 
several hostile and jarring parties: into Peelites, pro- 
tectionists and Whigs. Even in the Whig ranks there 
was defection and division. Palmerston had been dis- 
missed from the Foreign Office and driven into opposi- 
tion. Ever since the entrance of the Russell ministry 


COLLEGE AND STATE 85 


into office their administration had been characterized 
by hesitation, vacillation, and general ineffectiveness. 
Their fall in February, 1852, was therefore natural, 
though at the time not generally expected. They were 
succeeded by a ministry under the leadership of Lord 
Derby, in which Mr. Disraeli held the office of Chan- 
cellor of the Exchequer and fulfilled the functions of 
Icader of the House of Commons. But if Lord John 
Russell had been harassed by the cross fire of irre- 
concilable factions, much more was Lord Derby fet- 
tered by the uncertain support of a makeshift coali- 
tion. An appeal was taken to the country in behalf of 
the new government, and the new government was con- 
demned. The new Parliament met in November, 1852. 
It speedily became evident that the new ministers must 
go. he first important business of the session was 
Mr. Disraeli’s financial statement. Driven about by 
the winds of faction, anxious to conciliate two dis- 
cordant interests, that of the tory farmers who were 
clamoring for protection, and that of the Free Traders 
who were demanding a formal sanction of their policy, 
the Chancellor of the Exchequer submitted a budget 
which satisfied nobody. He was immediately attacked 
by an overwhelming force of Free Traders, Whigs and 
Peelites, and the great debate to which I have alluded 
set in. It has been described as a splendid display. 
On that November night, in a House full to overflowing 
with eager and excited listeners—members who were 
unable to find seats on the floor, gathering without the 
bar or in the galleries of the House—Mr. Gladstone 
won his first great victory over his life-long opponent. 
Mr. Disraeli had spoken long and with consummate 
skill: with all the vigor of desperation and all the elo- 
quence of determination. It was past midnight, the 
clock upon the towers of St. Stephen’s had struck the 
hour of two, when Mr. Gladstone, without previous 
preparation, sprang to the floor to answer him. The 
cheers which had followed Mr. Disraeli’s strangely 


86 COLLEGE AND STATE 


powerful defence had scarcely died away when Mr. 
Gladstone rose. It would be a bold pen indeed that 
would essay a description of the place and the scene. 
And yet it was a scene upon which the imagination 
would fain linger. ‘The hall of the House of Com- 
mons is not a large one. ‘The cushioned benches on 
which the members are crowded rise in close series on 
either side of a central aisle at one end of which stands 
the Speaker’s chair. Below his chair are the seats of 
the clerks and the broad table at either side of which, 
on the front benches nearest the Speaker, sit the Min- 
istry, and the leaders of the Opposition, the former to 
the Speaker’s right, the latter to his left. Above the 
rear benches and over the outer aisles of the House, 
beyond ‘‘the bar,” hang deep galleries. It seems a place 
intended for hand-to-hand combats; and on that chill, 
damp November morning, it witnessed a combat such 
as had seldom awakened its echoes before. The slender 
form of the eager orator rose in striking outline and 
bold relief from amidst the mass of earnest, upturned 
faces; from amongst the figures bent in postures of 
absorbed attention; from beneath the forms which 
leaned from the galleries as if intent to lose not one 
syllable of the speaker’s rushing speech, not one accent 
of the voice which was ringing its magnificent changes 
on the sentiments of his heart. For two hours did that 
marvellous voice fill the crowded spaces with its silvery 
vibrations, now breaking the hushed stillness of the 
chamber with its stirring tones, anon raising its clearer 
peals above the resounding cheers of the fired audience. 
The orator’s own apparent calmness was in strange 
contrast with the strong excitement of his hearers. His 
eye was touched, no doubt, with fire, and his lips livid 
with expression in their quivering partings; but his 
nerves were steadied like iron; only an occasional twitch- 
ing of the muscles of his face to indicate the stupendous 
movings of the spirit within. It seems to have been with 
him one of those supreme moments when all the ner- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 87 


vous tremors of self-consciousness are gone from 
the presence of the exalting and transforming inspira- 
tion of a cause. If Mr. Disraeli had dazzled, Mr. 
Gladstone had triumphed. ‘The House divided about 
four o'clock, and the government was left in a minority 
of nineteen. 

This was, as I have said, the first of Mr. Gladstone’s 
great oratorical triumphs. It won for him an undisputed 
primacy among English orators. Afterwards English- 
men came to regard John Bright as the greatest of 
English orators; but by none other in his own day, if 
even by him, has Mr. Gladstone been eclipsed. Glad- 
stone and Bright will probably be remembered by fu- 
ture generations as peers, rather than as rivals, in 
eloquence. Certainly no man was ever more unfail- 
ingly and uniformly eloquent than Mr. Gladstone. Even 
during his service as Prime Minister, when the require- 
ments of the daily conduct of business in the House of 
Commons called him daily and hourly to his feet, his 
reputation for eloquence never dimmed. His very 
explanations of matters of dry routine business made 
members turn interested and attentive towards himself. 
His poetic sensibilities manifested themselves here in 
communicating to matters of form and legislative de- 
tail, the life and light of his own mind. If he was 
sometimes betrayed by the very facility with which he 
could speak into weary lengths of explanation and per- 
plexing fullness of statement, there were at least corre- 
sponding lengths of interest and compensating pleni- 
tude of illustration. He seemed sometimes to waste 
his riches on trivial subjects; but when the subject was 
great the orator was supreme. He exalted matters of 
detail; but he at least never failed to master in all their 
breadth and scope the great concerns of national legis- 
lation and to magnify his consummate powers by the 
skill of his dealings with the weightier interests of the 
great empire he was set to rule. 

The astonishing achievements and successes of Mr. 


88 COLLEGE AND STATE 


Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign—the news of whose 
triumphant issue has just reached us as I write—seem 
a fitting culmination to his career as a statesman. His 
party is victorious and the very mention of his name 
is cheered by vast mass-meetings in every part of the 
kingdom. Beaconsfield is beaten; the brilliant reign of 
charlatanry is at an end; and the future lies with that 
great party whose loved and trusted leader is Mr. 
Gladstone. Providence has been pleased to brighten 
his declining years with a new assurance of victory to 
the cause in whose name he has spent the magnificent 
energies of his nature; and if this be the last work of 
his life, surely no happier time could come for the clos- 
ing scenes of the career of a man whose fame has not 
been bounded by continents or seas; whose works have 
been the works of progress; whose impulses have 
been the impulses of nobility; whose purposes have been 
the purposes of patriotism; whose days have been blessed 
by a genius which has been fired by devotion, tempered 
by discretion, purified by piety, and sanctified by love. 


ATTICUS. 


FIRST STATEMENT ON THE TARIFF 
QUESTION 


TESTIMONY OF MR. WOODROW WILSON OF ATLANTA, BE- 
FORE THE TARIFF COMMISSION, ATLANTA SESSION, 
SEPTEMBER 22, 1882. MR. WILSON WAS THEN 
PRACTICING LAW IN ATLANTA. FORTY-SEVENTH 
CONGRESS, 2D SESSION, HOUSE MISCELLANEOUS 
DOCUMENTS, VOL. III; REPORT OF THE TARIFF COM- 
MISSION, VOL. II, PP. 1294-1297. 


Mr. Wooprow WILSON, of Atlanta, said: 


It is not my purpose to represent or advocate any 
particular interest, but only to say a few words upon 
the general issues before you on the subject of protec- 
tion or free trade. ‘This question of the tariff is one 
which has been under consideration in Congress for go 
odd years. Early in the century protection was intro- 
duced for the purpose of fostering new manufactures 
in this country. ‘That system was continued down to 
the time of the war; but since the war it has been up- 
held professedly for the purpose of raising revenue, 
and to enable the government to recover from the in- 
debtedness caused by the war. Free trade, therefore, 
has been a slumbering question, but it will soon become 
one of the leading questions in all political discussions, 
because, now that peace has come, the people of the 
South will insist upon having the fruits of peace, and 
not being kept down under the burdens of war. 

As you have already been told, there is a great deal 
of ignorance and indifference in regard to these ques- 
tions in the South. The people here have been content 
to let things remain as they were. Probably this has 


89 


90 COLLEGE AND STATE 


resulted from the fact that the tariff is an indirect way 
of placing taxes upon the people, and they do not feel 
the immediate effects of it. But when the farmers 
and others begin to investigate these matters, they soon 
discover that they are, after all, paying these duties 
for the benefit of a few manufacturing classes. When 
a farmer discovers that he can buy a Jack-knife of Eng- 
lish manufacture for $1.30, while he has to pay $2 for 
a knife of American manufacture of the same quality, 
in order that the American manufacturer of cutlery may 
compete on equal terms with the British, then he feels 
that he has a personal interest in these subjects. 

In thinking of this matter of indirect taxation, ] am 
reminded of one of the few playful passages which illu- 
mine the utterances of Mr. Gladstone. In introducing 
his “budget” in 1861, he referred to direct and indirect 
taxation, and called them two sisters, the daughters of 
necessity and invention, one indeed more open and 
direct than the other, her sister more shy and insinuat- 
ing; but he said that, as chancellor of the exchequer, 
he felt bound to pay his addresses to both. We have 
these two charming sisters in America, but they cannot 
be said to be the daughters of necessity and invention; 
they are rather the daughters of invention and mo- 
nopoly. The necessities of our government are the ne- 
cessities of the revenue; and it is well known that our 
government is not embarrassed from any necessities of 
revenue; on the contrary, it has an immense surplus. It 
is undoubtedly a part of true wisdom that the taxes 
laid by the general government should be indirect taxes. 
The province of direct taxation should be left to the 
States, and in order that the two systems may not clash 
and overburden the people, it is a part of wise policy 
that the national government shall make the most of its 
taxation indirect. 

No man with his senses about him would recommend 
perfect freedom of trade in the sense that there should 
be no duties whatever laid on imports. The only thing 


COLLEGE AND STATE gI 


that free traders contend for is, that there shall be only 
-so much duty laid as will be necessary to defray the 
expenses of the government, reduce the public debt, 
and leave a small surplus for accumulation. But that 
surplus should be so small that it will not lead to job- 
bery and corruption of the worst sort. 

We often hear the question asked by the advocates 
of protection whether it is ‘a wise and consistent public 
policy for us to be dependent for supplies upon foreign 
governments. ‘That was asked in reference to cotton- 
ties. It was said that the cotton-tie was manufactured 
almost wholly in England, and the question was put to 
the witness, “Is it a part of wise policy that we should 
be dependent on England for our cotton-ties?” In 
other words, we fear dependence on foreign manufac- 
turers. Now, gentlemen, what does that mean? There 
is no danger in time of peace in being dependent on 
foreign manufacturers, because, if they raise their 
prices, the inevitable result will be that Americans will 
go into the manufacture and undersell them, and their 
prices must come down again. ‘Therefore we are in 
no danger in time of peace. So that the argument of 
the protectionist must be a war argument. Of course, 
if a war should occur between this country and Great 
Britain, it would be greatly to the disadvantage of our 
southern cotton-balers to be dependent entirely on the 
English manufacturer for their cotton-ties. So that 
the protectionist advocates a system which prepares for 
war, while it has not any consideration for the require- 
ments of the country in time of peace. I ask, is it 
worth while during fifty years of peace to provide by 
taxation for one year of war? Is it wise and just to 
tax the people for a contingency so that millions may be 
accumulated in the Treasury from the tax on these 
cotton-ties in order that war. at some distant period, 
which no man sees, may be provided for? War will 
cost a great deal when it comes; let it not be costing 
us in the mean time. 


g2 COLLEGE AND STATE 


Another stronghold of the protectionists is the ques- 
tion of wages. They say, ‘““How can we compete with 
the foreigners when the remuneration of labor is so 
much lower in foreign countries than in our own coun- 
try?’ Well, we can compete with them just as we do 
in regard to agricultural products. Of course every 
gentleman knows that our principal agricultural prod- 
ucts have no duty imposed upon them. English wheat 
and other produce may come into our markets free of 
duty, and there is a freedom of trade in that regard, so 
far as the farmer is concerned. 


By Commissioner GARLAND: 


Question. Do I understand you to say that there is 
no duty on wheat ?—Answer. So I understand by look- 
ing at the last returns. 

Commissioner GARLAND. Such is not my understand- 
ing. 

Commissioner OLIVER. Wheat pays 20 cents a bu- 
shel, and the farmers have been asking us to keep that 
duty on, because they say otherwise it would be imported 
from Manitoba. 

The Witness. Then I was misinformed. But it is 
a well-known fact that there is a greater disparity in 
the wages paid for agricultural labor in this country 
and in England than there is between wages paid in 
other industries, and although the duties on these agri- 
cultural products are lower, our competition with for- 
eigners in this regard is more successful. In other 
words, we make up for the high price of our wages 
by the fertility of our land. There is no land in the 
world that can compare in fertility with the land of 
the West, and the consequence is, we have an immense 
advantage in that regard. We have advantages also 
in other industries, such as in mining and in cotton 
productions. These are compensations which are pro- 
vided, and which no human laws can take away. 

There are positive grounds, however, upon which 


COLLEGE AND STATE 93 


protection can be objected to. It is understood that 
the protective tariff policy was adopted in this country 
in the beginning on the idea advocated by John Stuart 
Mill and one or two other eminent writers on the sub- 
ject in England, who said that a new country might 
with advantage protect its infant industries, provided 
the tariff which was laid for that purpose was merely 
a temporary expedient for building up those industries. 
It was upon that idea that America first established 
this protective system. What has been the result? 
These infant industries at first were protected by very 
small duties, but, instead of growing into manhood and 
strength, they have gone in to weaker decrepitude. 
They have needed more and more protection as years 
have gone on, until the climax has been reached at the 
present time. That ought to overthrow the whole 
doctrine in itself. But the danger in imposing protec- 
tive duties is, that when the policy is once embarked 
upon, it cannot be easily receded from. Protection is 
nothing more than a bounty, and when we offer bounties 
to manufacturers they will enter into industries and 
build up interests, and when at a later day we seek to 
overthrow this protective tariff, we must hurt some- 
body, and of course there is objection. ‘They will say, 
“Thousands of men will be thrown out of employment, 
and hundreds of people will lose their capital.”’ This 
seems very plausible; but I maintain that manufacturers 
are made better manufacturers whenever they are 
thrown upon their own resources and left to the natural 
competition of trade rather than when they are told, 
“You shall be held in the lap of the government, and 
you need not stand upon your feet.”’ Such theories dis- 
courage skill, because it puts all industries upon an arti- 
ficial basis. The basis that they rest upon is not that 
of the skill of the manufacturer; it is because the bounty 
of the government is put on his trade which enables him 
to get more for an inferior article than a foreigner 
could get for a better article. 


94 — COLLEGE AND STATE 


Protection also hinders commerce immensely. ‘The 
English people do not send as many goods to this coun- 
try as they would if the duties were not so much, and in 
that way there is a restriction of commerce, and we are 
building up manufactories here at the expense of com- 
merce. We are holding ourselves aloof from foreign 
countries in effect, and saying, ‘‘We are sufficient to 
ourselves; we wish to trade, not with England, but with 
each other.” I maintain that it is not only a pernicious 
system, but a corrupt system. 


By Commissioner GARLAND: 


_  Q. Are you advocating the repeal of all tariff laws? 

—A. Of all protective tariff laws; of establishing a 
tariff for revenue merely. It seems to me very absurd 
to maintain that we shall have free trade between dif- 
ferent portions of this country, and at the same time 
shut ourselves out from free communication with other 
producing countries of the world. If it is necessary 
to impose restrictive duties on goods brought from 
abroad, it would seem to me, as a matter of logic, neces- 
sary to impose similar restrictions on goods taken from 
one State of this Union to another. That follows as 
a necessary consequence; there is no escape from it. 


H. Mis. 6 82 


COMMITTEE OR CABINET GOVERNMENT? 


WRITTEN WHILE MR. WILSON WAS A STUDENT AT 
JOHNS HOPKINS. FROM THE ‘OVERLAND 
MONTHLY,” JANUARY, 1884; SERIES 2, VOL. II, 


17-33: 


“The only conceivable basis for government in the New World is 
the national will; and the political problem of the New World is 
how to build a strong, stable, enlightened, and impartial govern- 
ment on that foundation.’”—Goldwin Smith. 

“A humorist of our own day has laughed at Parliaments as 
‘talking shops,’ and the laugh has been echoed by some who have 
taken humour for argument. But talk is persuasion, and persuasion 
is force; and the one force which can sway free men to deeds such 
as those which have made England what she is.”—J. R. Green. 


| ERE House of Representatives is a superlatively 
noisy assembly. Other legislative bodies are 
noisy, but not with the noise of the House of Repre- 
sentatives. We are told that the slightest cause of ex- 
citement will set the French National Assembly fran- 
tically agog; that the English House of Commons is 
often loud voiced in its disorderly demonstrations; and 
that even our stolid cousins, the Germans, do not always 
refrain from guttural clamor when in Reichstag as- 
sembled. Our own House of Representatives, how- 
ever, indulges in a confusion peculiar to itself. Prob- 
ably the representatives themselves soon became 
accustomed to the turmoil in which they are daily con- 
strained to live, and are seldom heedful of the extreme 
disorder which prevails about them; but a visitor to the 
House of Representatives experiences upon entering 
its galleries for the first time sensations which it is not 
easy to define or to describe. 

The hall of the House is large beyond the expecta- 
tion of the visitor. For each of the three hundred and 

95 


96 COLLEGE AND STATE 


twenty-five Representatives there is provided a roomy 
desk, and an easy, revolving chair—a chair about which 
there is space ample enough for the stretching of tired 
legislative legs in any position of restful extension that 
may suit the comfort of the moment. ‘The desks and 
seats stand around the Speaker’s chair in a great semi- 
circle, ranged in rows which radiate from that seat of 
authority as a center. Here and there a broad aisle 
runs between two rows of seats, from the circumference 
of the semicircle to the roomy spaces about the clerk’s 
and Speaker’s desks. Outside the seats, and beyond the 
bar which surrounds them, are other broad, soft-car- 
peted spaces; and still there is room, beyond these 
again, for deep galleries to extend on every side their 
tiers of benches, before the limiting walls of the vast 
hall are reached. Overhead, framed by the polished 
beams which support them, are great squares of ground 
glass, through which a strong light falls on the voting 
and vociferating magnates below. 

One would suppose that it would require a great deal 
of noise to fill that great room. Filled it is, though, 
during the sittings of the House. It is not the noises 
of debate, but the incessant and full-volumed hum of 
conversation, and the sharp clapping of hands that 
strikes the ear. The clapping of hands is not sustained 
and concerted, but desultory, like a dropping fire of 
musketry; for these gentlemen in their easy chairs are 
not applauding any one—they are only striking their 
palms together as a signal-call to the young pages who 
act as messengers and errand-boys, and who add the 
confusion of movement to the confusion of sound, as 
they run hither and thither about the hall. Members, 
too, stroll about, making friendly visits to the desks of 
acquaintances, or holding informal consultations with 
friends and colleagues. When in their seats, they seem 
engrossed in assorting documents, in writing letters, 
or in reading newspapers, whose stiff rattle adds va- 
riety to the prevailing disorder. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 97 


Some business is evidently going on the while; though 
the onlooker in the gallery must needs give his closest 
attention in order to ascertain just what is being done. 
Now and again a member rises and addresses the chair, 
but his loudest tones scarcely reach the galleries in the 
form of articulate speech; and the responsive rulings of 
the Speaker are not so distinctly audible as are the in- 
effectual rappings of his restless gavel. Naturally, 
therefore, very few members try to speak. ‘They do 
not covet an opportunity to do so, in a hall which none 
but the clearest and strongest voice could fill, even if 
the silence of attention were vouchsafed. However 
frequent one’s visits to the capitol, he will seldom find 
the House engaged in debate. When some member, 
more daring, more determined, more hardy, or more 
confident than the rest, does essay to address the House, 
he generally finds that it will not listen, and that he 
must content himself with such audience as is given him 
by those in his immediate neighborhood, who are so 
near him that they cannot easily escape listening. His 
most strenuous efforts will not avail to make members 
in distant seats conscious that he is on the floor. They 
are either indifferent to what he is saying, or prefer to 
read it in the “Record” to-morrow. 

This, then, is seemingly a most singular assembly. It 
seldom engages in lengthy debate, being apparently con- 
tent to leave that dignified and generally unexciting ex- 
ercise to the Senate; whose hall is, because of its smaller 
size, better suited for such employments, and where 
greater decorum prevails. It would be a mistake, how- 
ever, to conclude that the careless manners of the House 
betoken idleness. Its sessions are, on the contrary, 
generally quite busy. It has been known to pass thirty- 
seven pension bills at one sitting. The chief end of its 
rules is expedition in business, and such wholesale legis- 
lation is, accordingly, not only possible but usual; for, 
be it remembered, the House does not have to digest 
its schemes of legislation. It has standing commit- 


98 COLLEGE AND STATE 


tees which do its digesting for it. It deliberates in frag- 
ments, through small sections of its membership, and 
when it comes together as a whole, votes upon the bills 
laid before it by these authoritative committees, with 
scant measure of talk. 

It is this plan of entrusting itself to the guidance of 
various small bodies of its members that distinguishes 
our House of Representatives from the other great leg- 
\islative bodies of the world. It is not peculiar in being 
omnipotent in all national aftairs; the Commons of Eng- 
land and the Assembly of France are equally omnipo- 
tent; but it is peculiar in being awkward at exercising 
its omnipotence. Though, as a matter of fact, above 
the Executive in undisputed supremacy; though the 
President and his Cabinet are its servants; though they 
must collect and expend the public revenues as it directs; 
must observe its will in all dealings with foreign States, 
are dependent upon it for means to support both army 
and navy—nay, even for means to maintain the depart- 
ments themselves; though they are led by it in all the 
main paths of their policies, and must obey its biddings 
even in many of the minor concerns of every-day busi- 
ness; though whenever it chooses to interfere, it is pow- 
erful to command: it is altogether dissociated from the 
Executive in its organization, and is often mightily em- 
barrassed in wielding its all-embracing authority. It 
directs the departments; but it stands outside of them, 
and can know nothing clearly of their operation. 

Its immediate agents in its guidance of executive af- 
fairs are its standing committees. ) Constrained to pro- 
vide for itself leaders of some sort or other, Congress 
has found them in certain small and select bodies of 
men, to whom it has entrusted the preparation of legisla- 
tion. It could not undertake to consider separately each 
of the numberless bills which might be brought in by its 
members. If it were to undertake to do so, its docket 
would become crowded beyond all hope of clearance, 
and its business fall appallingly into arrears. It must 


COLLEGE AND STATE 99 


facilitate its business by an apportionment of labor, and 
by dividing make possible the task of digesting this vari- 
ous matter. 

Accordingly, it has set up numerous standing com- 
mittees, whose duty it is to prepare legislation and to 
act as its immediate agents in all its dealings with the 
executive departments. The Secretary of the Treasury 
must heed the commands of the Finance Committee of 
the Senate and the Ways and Means Committee of the 
House; the Secretary of State must in all things regard 
the will of the Foreign Affairs Committees of both 
Houses; the Secretary of the Interior must suffer him- 
self to be bidden, now by the Committees on Indian 
Affairs, now by those on the Public Lands, and again 
by those on Patents. The Secretary of War must as- 
siduously do service to the Committees on Military Af- 
fairs; to still other committees the Postmaster-General 
must render homage; the Secretary of the Navy must 
wear the livery of the Committees on Naval Affairs; 
and the Attorney-General must not forget that. one or 
more of these eyes of the Houses are upon him. There 
are Committees on Appropriations, Committees on the 
Judiciary, Committees on Banking and Currency, Com- 
mittees on Manufactures, Committees on Railways and 
Canals, Committees on Pensions and on Claims, Com- 
mittees on Expenditures in the several Departments, 
and on the Expenditures on Public Buildings, commit- 
tees on this and committees on that, committees on 
every conceivable subject of legislation. 

And these standing committees are very selfish. 

Congress, by spoiling them with petting, has made 
them exacting. It indulges their every whim; for the 
rules of the House of Representatives provide for the 
expedition of business by securing beyond a peradven- 
ture the supremacy of its committees. Full of puzzling 
intricacies and complicated checks as these rules seem, 
this is their very simple purpose. There must be the 
utmost possible limitation of debate. Every session, of 


100 COLLEGE AND STATE 


course, a great many bills, sometimes several thousand, 
are introduced by individual members and there is 
not time to discuss or even to vote upon them all. 
Accordingly, the right of individual representatives to 
have their proposals separately considered must be sac- 
rificed to the common convenience. ‘The bills which are 
sent by scores to the clerk’s desk every week when the 
roll of States is called are, therefore, all sent to the 
standing committees. Scarcely a topic can be touched 
which does not fall within the province of one or an- 
other of these committees, and so no bill escapes com- 
mitment. 

But a bill committed is a bill doomed. Suppose, for 
example, that the Appropriations Committee has fifty 
or a hundred bills referred to it—and that would doubt- 
less be much fewer than usual—how can there be a sep- 
arate report upon each? ‘Time would not serve for 
such an undertaking. The committee must simply re- 
ject utterly most of the bills, and, having from the re- 
mainder culled the provisions they like, frame for sub- 
mission to the House a comprehensive scheme of their 
own. 

As a rule, therefore, the debates of the House of 
Representatives are confined to the reports of the com- 
mittees, and even upon these reports the House does 
not care to spend much time. Consequently, its debates 
upon their contents can seldom with strict accuracy be 
called debates of the House. They are in the House, 
but not of it. ‘The period of debate and the number of 
speakers are usually limited by rule. So long a time, 
and so long only, is devoted to each discussion, and dur- 
ing that time the members of the reporting committee 
are accorded right of precedence for the presentation 
of their views upon the subject in hand, other members 
gaining the floor only when committeemen are courte- 
ous enough to give way to them. 

The House makes its nearest approach to business 
debate when in Committee of the Whole. Then some- 


COLLEGE AND STATE IOI 


thing like free and effective discussion takes place. 
Even then, however, members are not given unlimited 
scope. They must not talk longer than five minutes at 
a time. Though the House is no longer the House, 
and has put on the free habits of committee work, it 
still retains its predilections, and still binds itself by 
rules which are stingy of time to those who would speak. 
Five-minute speeches, moreover, gain little more atten- 
tion than is vouchsafed to the one-hour speeches of com- 
mitteemen during a regular session; for the Commit- 
tee of the Whole is no better listener than its other self, 
the House. Members are almost quite as noisy and 
inattentive as when the Speaker is in his chair. 

The conclusion of the whole matter, then, is that 
legislation is altogether in the hands of the standing 
committees. In matters of finance, the Committee of 
Ways and Means is, to all intents and purposes, the 
whole House; on questions affecting the national judi- 
ciary the Judiciary Committee practically dictates the 
decision of the whole House; when expenditures have 
received the approval of the Appropriations Commit- 
tee, they have virtually received the sanction of the 
whole House; the recommendations of the Committee 
on Naval Affairs are as a matter of course the will of 
the whole House; and so on, from the beginning to the 
end of every chapter of legislation. All the House’s 
work is done in the committee rooms. When measures 
issue thence, only the formality of a vote in regular ses- 
sion—a vote often given without debate—is needed to 
erect them into bills, acts of the House of Representa- 
tives. 

By whom, then, it becomes interesting to inquire, are 
these masterful committees named? And what is the 
rule of their organization? The privilege and duty 
of their appointment are vested in the Speaker, and by 
such investiture Mr. Speaker is constituted the most 
powerful functionary in the government of the United 
States. For what can he not accomplish through this 


102 COLLEGE AND STATE 


high prerogative? He may, of course, discharge his 
exalted trust with honor and integrity: but consider the 
temptations which must overcome him if he be not 
made of the staunchest moral stuff. Is the public treas- 
ury full, and is he bent by conviction or by personal 
interest toward certain great schemes of public expen- 
diture? With how strong a hand must he restrain his 
inclinations if he would deny himself the privilege, 
which he can enjoy without authoritative contradiction 
from any one, of constituting men of like mind with 
himself a controlling majority of the Appropriations 
Committee? Has he determined opinions upon ques- 
tions of revenue and taxation which he has reason to 
fear will not be the opinions which are likely to pre- 
vail in the House? Who, if he do not prevent himself, 
will prevent him from naming those of the same opinion 
a ruling number on the Committee of Ways and Means? 
Has he friends whose influence was potential in bring- 
ing about his elevation to the chair? Who will be sur- 
prised if he give those friends the most coveted chair- 
manships? Does one of these friends feel a special 
interest in building up the navy? ‘That friend will con- 
sider Mr. Speaker a shameless ingrate if his gratitude 
do not move him to the bestowal of a place of highest 
authority on both Naval and Appropriations Com- 
mittees. 

As a matter of fact—unless many outrageous calum- 
nies are allowed to run abroad unchallenged—very few 
Speakers forbid their own personal preferences and 
predilections a voice in the appointment of committees. 
Many Speakers are men of strong individuality and 
resolute purpose, who have won their position by domi- 
nant force of will; and such men are sure to make them- 
selves seen and felt in the composition of the commit- 
tees. They are acknowledged autocrats. Other Speak- 
ers, on the other hand, are mere puppets—obscure men 
who have been raised to the chair by accidents, such as 
sometimes foist third-rate politicians into the Presi- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 103 


dency—men whom caucuses have hit upon simply be- 
cause they could not agree on anybody else. Such men 
appoint committees as others suggest. They go as 
they are led. In their appointments only those are fa- 
vored who have established a claim upon their grati- 
tude, or an influence over their irresponsible wills, or 
those who are nominated to their favor by an irresist- 
ible custom of the House. 

But, turning from Mr. Speaker to his nominees, it 
is proper to ask: How and where are the proceedings 
of the committees conducted? With a simple organi- 
zation of chairman and clerk, each committee sits in a 
room apart in comparative privacy, no one who is not 
on its roll being expected to be present uninvited. To 
assist it in its determinations, it may invite the pres- 
ence of any executive officer of the government—though 
it does not appear that it has power to compel his at- 
tendance—and it often allows the advocates of special 
measures to present their arguments at length before 
it. But any committee that pleases may shut its doors 
against all comers and sit in absolute secrecy. On 
what grounds a committee acted is seldom clearly made 
known to the public. Why this or that bill, which was 
introduced by some member and referred without de- 
bate to the committee, was rejected by it no one can 
easily tell. “The minutes of the committee, if any were 
kept, are not accessible, and all that appears from the 
journals of the House is that the committee, when it. 
reported, said nothing of the bill in question. ‘The 
public, in short, can know little or nothing about the 
motives or the methods of the standing committees: 
and yet all legislation may be said to originate with 
them, and to pass through all its stages under their di- 
rection. : 

The feature, therefore, which distinguishes our na- 
tional legislation from that of other nations is, that it is 
the fruit of this unique system of committee govern- 
ment, which we may claim the credit of having invented. 


104 COLLEGE AND STATE 


In our Federal relations, we are directed by laws issu- 
ing from the privacy of irresponsible committees, and 
promulgated without debate. [hese committees are 
the wheels of the American system: but it is not in them 
that its motive power resides. We have not seen the 
whole of our machinery of government until we have 
visited that caucus where all the fires of legislative ac- 
tion are kindled. 

There are caucuses and caucuses, separating them- 
selves into two principal kinds, nominating and legisla- 
tive. Of the first sort are those small bodies, too often 
bands of schemers and office-holders, of idlers and small 
‘bosses,’ which meet in every election district, how- 
ever little, to nominate candidates for local offices; those 
larger bodies, which generally work themselves into a 
heat of vexation and intrigue in naming insignificant 
men for State offices; and those great stormy conven- 
tions whose frenzy gives birth to a “ticket” for Presi- 
dent and Vice-President of the Union. All office-hold- 
ers, from town-clerks through Congressmen to Presi- 
dents, are children of caucuses of this pattern. But 
these are not the caucuses with which we are now most 
concerned; these are not the caucuses which immedi- 
ately dominate legislation. Of such authority is the 
caucus legislative, the deliberative party committee. 
Representatives of the same party, when assembled in 
Congress or in State Legislature, feel bound to do what- 
ever they do in most inviolate concert: so they whip 
themselves together into deliberative caucus. If any 
doubt at any time arise as to the proper course to be 
taken in regard to any pending measure, there must 
be secret consultations in supreme party caucus, in order 
that each partisan’s conscience may be relieved of all 
suspicion of individual responsibility, and the forces of 
the party concentrated against the time for actual vot- 
ing. ‘The congressional caucus rooms are the central 
chambers of our Constitution. 

The caucus was a natural and legitimate, if not 


COLLEGE AND STATE 105 


healthy offspring of our peculiar institutions. Legisla- 
tive caucuses and even nominating caucuses were neces- 
sitated by the complete separation of the legislative and 
executive departments of our government. By reason 
of that separation Congress is made supreme within 
the sphere of the Federal authority. There is none to 
compete with it. To it belongs the hand of power— 
the power of the purse and of the law—and it has nat- 
urally stretched forth that hand to brush away all obsta- 
cles to the free exercise of its sovereignty. But, al- 
though always master, it was at first, as has been said, 
embarrassed to find efficient means of exercising its mas- 
tery. It was, from the beginning, a rather numerous 
body, and in order to rule with vigor it was necessary 
that it should itself be ruled. It was, however, so or- 
ganized, and so isolated from the other branches of the 
Federal system, as to render any authoritative personal 
leadership impracticable. There could scarcely be in 
either House any man or body of men able from sheer 
supremacy of genius or influence of will to guide its 
actions and command its deliberations. Some man of 
brilliant argumentative gifts and conspicuous sagacity 
might gain temporary sway by reason of his eloquence 
or a transient authority by virtue of his wisdom; but, 
however transcendent his talents, however indisputable 
his fitness for the post, he could never constitute him- 
self the official leader of the Legislature; nor could his 
fellow members ever invest him with the rights of com- 
mand. Manifestly, however, the House must have 
leadership of some kind. If no one man could receive the 
office of command, it must be given to sub-committees 
—to bodies small enough to be efficient, and yet so nu- 
merous that predominant power would be within the 
reach of no one of them. In such bodies, accordingly, 
it was vested; and so birth was given to that govern- 
ment by committees which now flourishes in such luxuri- 
ant vigor. 

But that very feature of committee government 


106 COLLEGE AND STATE 


which makes it seem to many persons the best conceiv- 
able legislative mechanism, is the principal cause of its 
clumsiness, and is that which makes the congressional 
caucus an absolute necessity. It is because the commit- 
tees are too numerous to combine for purposes of rule; 
because they cannot act in concert; because there is and 
can be no codperation amongst them; because, instead 
of acting together, they must frequently work at cross- 
purposes; because there can be no unity or consistency 
in their policy; because they are disintegrate particles of 
an inharmonious whole, that the deliberative party cau- 
cus exists and is all-powerful. If either of the national 
parties is to follow any distinct line of action, it must 
make its determinations independently of its represen- 
tatives on the committees, who cannot act with that 
oneness of purpose which is made possible only by pre- 
vised combination. The party itself must come to- 
gether in committee whenever, in critical seasons of 
doubt, it is necessary to assure itself of its own unity of 
purpose. It does so come together, and its delibera- 
tions are known as the sittings of a caucus. Such, there- 
fore, was the natural and inevitable generation of the 
caucus legislative. 

How the caucus legislative grew strong and bold, and 
how finally it has usurped the highest seats of govern- 
ment, or how the nominating caucus had its birth and 
growth, it is not in this place needful to relate. Suf- 
fice it to say that, as everybody knows, it has at length 
come to pass, by reason of the power of caucuses, that 
we are governed by a narrow oligarchy of party man- 
agers, that we have no great harmonious party ma- 
jorities, that factions are supreme; factions manipulat- 
ing caucuses and managing conventions; factions sneak- 
ing in committee rooms and pulling the wires that move 
Mr. Speaker; factions in the President’s closet and at 
governors’ ears; that cliques scheme and “bosses” 
manage. 

None can doubt, therefore, that we are fallen upon 


COLLEGE AND STATE 107 


times of grave crisis in our national affairs, and none 
can wonder that disgust for our present system speaks 
from the lips of citizens respectable both for numbers 
and for talents. Every day we hear men speak with bit- 
ter despondency of the decadence of our institutions, 
of the incompetence of our legislators, of the corrup- 
tion of our public officials, even of the insecurity of our 
liberties. Nor are these the notes of a tocsin which 
peals in the ears of only a few panic-struck brains. The 
whole nation seems at times to be vaguely and inarticu- 
lately alarmed, restlessly apprehensive of some impend- 
ing calamity. Not many years ago it required consid- 
erable courage to question publicly the principles of the 
Constitution; now, whenever the veriest scribbler shoots 
his small shafts at that great charter, many wise heads 
are wagged in acquiescent approval. It is too late to 
laugh at these things. When grave, thoughtful, per- 
spicacious and trusted men all around us agree in de- 
riding those ‘‘Fourth of July sentiments” which were 
once thought to hallow the lips of our greatest orators 
and to approve the patriotism of our greatest states- 
men, it will not do for us, personifying the American 
eagle, to flap wing and scream out incoherent disap- 
proval. If we are to hold to the old faith, we must be 
ready with stout reasons wherewith to withstand its as- 
sailants. It will not suffice to say, ‘“These are the glo- 
rious works of our revered ancestors; let not profane 
voices be lifted up against them, nor profane hands seek 
to compass their destruction.” Men whose patriotism 
is as undoubted and as indubitable as our own are lightly 
and freely flinging their taunts at these sacred institu- 
tions of ours, and it must be that they represent a large 
body of our countrymen who believe that corruption 
and personal ambition are converting the public service 
into a money-making trade. 

Already discussion of the evils that beset and distress 
us is assuming definite shape and uttering a determined 
voice. Incoherent grumblings and passionate appeals 


108 COLLEGE AND STATE 


are giving place to calm suggestions of remedy and dis- 
tinct plans of reform. Echoes of such discussion have 
been heard even beyond the sea, so loud and bold have 
they grown, and foreigners are pricking up their ears 
to hear what it is that we are about to do. ‘They realize 
that great changes are a-making. 

Of all the suggestions that have been ventured, the 
one which we can best afford to ignore is that one which 
is most frequently made, that by some ingenious nine- 
teenth-century device political parties be altogether 
ousted from our system. This is much too weak a pill 
against the earthquake. It is sadly true—let it be ad- 
mitted—that in this country party government has of 
late years sunk into a degradation at once pitiable and 
disastrous. But party government is inseparable from 
representative government. Representative govern- 
ment is, indeed, only another name for government by 
partisan majorities. When the people govern, they 
must govern by majorities. Mayjorities rule in munici- 
pal, in State, and in national affairs alike. Representa- 
tive government is government by majorities, and gov- 
ernment by majorities is party government, which up to 
the present date is the only known means of self-govern- 
ment. It is the embodiment of that habit of popular rule 
which is the peculiar glory of our race, which is sur- 
rounded by so great traditions, and hallowed by so 
glorious memories. 

In political action, as in all other action, men must 
join hand and purpose. ‘Burke admitted that when he 
saw a man acting a desultory and disconnected part in 
public life with detriment to his fortune, he was ready 
to believe such a man to be in earnest though not ready 
to believe him to be in the right. In any case he la- 
mented to see rare and valuable qualities squandered 
away without any public utility. He admitted, more- 
over, on the other hand, that people frequently acquired 
in party confederacies a narrow, bigoted, and proscrip- 
tive spirit. But where duty renders a critical situation a 


COLLEGE AND STATE 109 


necessary one, it is our business to keep free from the 
evils attendant upon it, and not to fly from the situation 
itself. It is surely no very rational account of a man 
that he has always acted right, but has taken special care 
to act in such a manner that his endeavors could not 
possibly be productive of any consequence. . . . When 
men are not acquainted with each other’s principles, nor 
experienced in each other’s talents, nor at all practiced 
in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint ef- 
forts of business; no personal confidence, no friendship, 
no common interest subsisting among them; it is evi- 
dently impossible that they can act a public part with 
uniformity, perseverance, and efficacy.” “He pointed 
out to emulation the Whig junto who held so close to- 
gether in the reign of Anne—Sunderland, Godolphin, 
Somers and Marlborough—who believed ‘that no men 
could act with efiect who did not act in concert; that no 
men could act in concert who did not act with confi- 
dence; that no men could act with confidence who were 
not bound together by common opinions, common affec- 
tions, and common interests.’ ’’ 4 

What we stand in need of, therefore, is party respon- 
sibility, and not the abolition of parties. Provided with 
parties in abundance, and entertained with many nice 
professions of political principle, we lack party respon- 
sibility. American parties are seldom called to account 
for any breach of their engagements, how solemnly so- 
ever those engagements may have been entered into. 
They thrive as well on dead issues as on living princi- 
ples. Are not campaigns still yearly won with the voice 
of war-cries which represent only bygone feuds, and 
which all true men wish were as silent as the lips that 
first gave them utterance? ‘Platforms’ are built only 
for conventions to sit on, and fall into decay as of 
course when conventions adjourn. Such parties as we 
have, parties with worn-out principles and without defi- 
nite policies, are unmitigated nuisances. They are 


*Morley’s Burke (Eng. Men of Letters Series), pp. 52, 53. 


110 COLLEGE AND STATE 


savory with decay, and rank with rottenness. They are 
ready for no service, but to be served. Their natural 
vocation is to debauch the public morals, to corrupt and 
use the people; and the people’s only remedy is a stern 
and prompt exercise of their sovereign right. These 
parties must be roughly shaken out of their insolence, 
and made to realize that they are only servants, and, 
being servants, will be expected and required to act with 
trustworthiness, with all honesty and all fidelity. 

But how? ‘There is much talk afloat about the duty 
of good citizens to go to the “primaries” and withstand 
in force the iniquities of the mercenaries of machine 
government. Many voices are uttering very manly calls 
upon public opinion to assert itself and make exercise 
of its sovereignty; but they do not advise this multitudi- 
nous monarch—the people—how it is to act. Every- 
body admires outspoken denunciations of wrong, and 
applauds exhortations to turn again to virtue and to rec- 
titude; but very few care to go into an undiscovered 
country unless they be guided. The reform of govern- 
ment is not an everyday business, and one would like 
to be taught the out-of-the-way trade. We are enjoined 
to the work, but no one will lead or direct. One would 
suppose that it must be, after all, that the means of re- 
form are so obvious that its advocates do not deem it 
necessary to point them out. The people must make 
imperative demand to be better governed, that is all. 

But there’s the rub, the trouble, and the puzzle. This 
very demand seems to be daily a-making. There is 
every reason to believe that the public mind is already 
quite made up. So stiffly does the breeze of opinion set 
towards reform that nearly all the political papers of 
the country have long since gotten well before it; even 
the one-time open pirates of the spoils system busily 
trimming their sails, and none so bold as to beat up 
directly against it. Besides, those who are striving with 
all their breath to blow this wind into still fiercer blasts, 
complaisantly tell us that all who are still essaying to 


COLLEGE AND STATE III 


weather it are fast losing heart. Or, the metaphor 
changed, it may be said that the people has declared its 
will; that the land is full of heralds whose loud voices 
proclaim its decree. The winds seem to be bringing 
to each community from every quarter of the land the 
news that upon this great question the whole country 
is agreed. The nation is of one mind. What then? 
Has the blow been struck? Do the rulers hear the voice 
of their overlord, and is reform already inaugurated, 
or do we still wait for its coming? “If it were done 
when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.” 

The fact is, that in this matter, as in so many others, 
public opinion seems to be in danger of being disap- 
pointed of its omnipotence. ‘Those who enjoy the spoils 
system love the caucus, and do not readily bend the 
knee to the people; and those who hope some day to 
come in for the favors of that system, themselves 
equally in love with the caucus, cautiously draw rein, 
and will not lead the hunters who would pursue it to its 
destruction. Public opinion, meanwhile, is left to hum 
and haw in distressing embarrassment over the ques- 
tion, What is to be done? How is the popular will to 
enforce its authority? What advantage is there in be- 
ing unanimous? 

It is only by making parties responsible for what 
they do and advise that they can be made safe and 
reliable servants. It is plain to see that this caucus on 
which our present party system rides is a very ugly beast, 
and a very unmanageable one. WHe cannot be driven 
with a chirp, nor commanded with a word. He will 
obey only the strong hand, and heed only the whip. To 
rail at him is of no good. He must be taken sternly 
in hand, and be harnessed, whether he will or no, in our 
service. Our search must be for the bit that will curb 
and subdue him. 

In seeking an escape from the perplexity, manifestly 
the safest course is to content ourselves with traveling 
ways already trodden, and look to the precedents of 


112 COLLEGE AND STATE 


our own race for guidance. Let, therefore, the leaders 
of parties be made responsible. Let there be set apart 
from the party in power certain representatives who, 
leading their party and representing its policy, may be 
made to suffer a punishment which shall be at once per- 
sonal and vicarious when their party goes astray, or 
their policy either misleads or miscarries. ‘This can be 
done by making the leaders of the dominant party in 
Congress the executive officers of the legislative will; by 
making them also members of the President’s Cabinet, 
and thus at once the executive chiefs of the depart- 
ments of State and the leaders of their party on the 
floor of Congress; in a word, by having done with the 
standing committees, and constituting the Cabinet ad- 
visers both of the President and of Congress. This 
would be Cabinet government. 

Cabinet government is government by means of an 
executive ministry chosen by the chief magistrate of the 
nation from the ranks of the legislative majority—a 
ministry sitting in the legislature and acting as its execu- 
tive committee; directing its business and leading its 
debates; representing the same party and the same prin- 
ciples; ‘bound, together by a sense of responsibility and 
loyalty to the party to which it belongs,” and subject 
to removal whenever it forfeits the confidence and loses 
the support of the body it represents. Its establishment 
in the United States would involve, of course, several 
considerable changes in our present system. It would 
necessitate, in the first place, one or two alterations in 
the Constitution. The second clause of Section Six, Ar- 
ticle I, of the Constitution runs thus: ‘‘No Senator 
or Representative shall, during the term for which he 
was elected, be appointed to any civil office under the 
authority of the United States which shall have been 
created, or the emoluments whereof shall have been in- 
creased, during such time; and no person holding any 
office under the United States shall be a member of 
either House during his continuance in office.”’ Let the 


COLLEGE AND STATE 113 


latter part of this clause read: “And no person holding 
any other than a Cabinet office under the United States 
shall be a member of either House during his continu- 
ance in office,”’ and the addition of four words will have 
removed the chief constitutional obstacle to the erection 
of Cabinet government in this country. The way will 
have been cleared, in great part at least, for the devel- 
opment of a constitutional practice, which, founded 
upon the great charter we already possess, might grow 
into a governmental system at once strong, stable, and 
flexible. Those four words being added to the Consti- 
tution, the President might be authorized and directed 
to choose for his Cabinet the leaders of the ruling ma- 
jority in Congress; that Cabinet might, on condition of 
acknowledging its tenure of office dependent on the fa- 
vor of the Houses, be allowed to assume those privi- 
leges of initiative in legislation and leadership in debate 
which are now given, by an almost equal distribution, to 
the standing committees; and Cabinet government 
would have been instituted. 

To insure the efficiency of the new system, however, 
additional amendments of the Constitution would 
doubtless be necessary. Unless the President’s tenure 
of office were made more permanent than it now is, he 
could not fairly be expected to exercise that im- 
partiality in the choice of ministers, his legislative ad- 
visers and executive colleagues, which would be indis- 
pensable to good government under such a system; and 
no executive Cabinet which was dependent on the will 
of a body subject to biennial change—and which, be- 
cause it is elected for only two years, is the more apt to 
be ruled by the spirit of faction and caught by every 
cunningly-devised fable—could have that sense of se- 
curity without which there can be neither steadiness 
of policy nor strength of statesmanship. It must be- 
come necessary to lengthen both presidential and con- 
gressional terms. If the President must expect his 
authority to end within the short space of four years, he 


114 COLLEGE AND STATE 


must be excused for caprice in the choice of his Sec- 
retaries. If no faithfulness and diligence of his can 
extend the period of his official authority by even so 
much as a single week, it cannot be reasonable to expect 
him to sacrifice his will to the will of others, or to sub- 
ordinate his wishes to the public good during the short 
season of that brief authority’s secure enjoyment. And, 
if Cabinets be vouchsafed but two years in which to 
mature the policies they may undertake, they cannot 
justly be blamed for haste and improvidence. They 
could not safely be appointed, or safely trusted to rule 
after appointment, under a system of quadrennial presi- 
dencies and biennial legislatures. Unless both presi- 
dential and congressional terms were extended, govern- 
ment would be both capricious and unstable. And they 
could be the more easily extended, because to lengthen 
them would be to change no principle of the Constitu- 
tion. The admission of members of Congress to seats 
in the Cabinet would be the only change of principle 
called for by the new order of things. 

Cabinet government has in it everything to recom- 
mend it. Especially to Americans should it commend 
itself. It is, first of all, the simplest and most straight- 
forward system of party government. It gives explicit 
authority to that party majority which in any event will 
exercise its implicit powers to the top of its bent; which 
will snatch control if control be not given it. It is a 
simple legalization of fact; for, as every one knows, 
we are not free to choose between party government 
and no-party government. Our choice must be between 
a party that rules by authority and a party that, where 
it has not a grant of the right to rule, will make itself 
supreme by stratagem. It is not parties in open and 
legitimate organization that are to be feared, but those 
that are secretly banded together, begetters of hidden 
schemes and ugly stratagems. 

Cabinet government would, moreover, put the neces- 
sary bit in the mouth of beast caucus, and reduce him 


COLLEGE AND STATE 11s 


to his proper service; for it would secure open-doored 
government. It would not suffer legislation to skulk 
in committee closets and caucus conferences. Light is 
the only thing that can sweeten our political atmosphere 
—light thrown upon every detail of administration in 
the departments; light diffused through every passage 
of policy; light blazed full upon every feature of legis- 
‘ation; light that can penetrate every recess or corner 
in which any intrigue might hide; light that will open 
to view the innermost chambers of government, drive 
away all darkness from the treasury vaults, illuminate 
foreign correspondence, explore national dockyards, 
search out the obscurities of Indian affairs, display the 
workings of justice, exhibit the management of the 
army, play upon the sails of the navy, and follow the 
distribution of the mails—and of such light Cabinet 
government would be a constant and plentiful source. 
For, consider the conditions of its existence. Debate 
would be the breath of its nostrils: for the ministers’ 
tenure of office would be dependent on the vindication 
of their policy. No member of a Cabinet who had iden- 
tified himself with any pending measure could with self- 
respect continue in office after the majority, whose rep- 
resentative he would be, had rejected that measure by 
a formal and deliberate vote. If, under such circum- 
stances, he did not at once resign, he would forfeit 
all claim to manly independence. For him to remain 
in office would be to consent to aid in administering a 
policy of which he was known to disapprove, and thus 
to lose the respect of all honorable opponents and the 
support of all conscientious friends. It would be sacri- 
ficing principle to an unworthy love of office; preferring 
mere place to integrity; openly professing willingness 
to do the bidding of opponents rather than forego the 
empty honors of conspicuous station held without con- 
spicuous worth. A man who held an office thus would 
soon be shamed into retirement; or, were no place left 


116 COLLEGE AND STATE 


for shame, would be driven from his authority by a 
scorn-laden vote. 

Moreover, the members of the Cabinet would always 
be united in their responsibility. They would stand or 
fall together in the event of the acceptance or rejection 
of any measure to which they had given their joint sup- 
port./ Otherwise, they would be no better leaders than 
the present standing committees; the differences, the 
disputes, and the antagonisms of the council-board would 
be renewed and reheated in the debates on the floor of 
Congress; the country would be scandalized at seeing 
ministers cross swords in open contention; personal 
spites would flame out in public between uncongenial 
ministers; there would be unseemly contests for the 
leadership./ An ununited Cabinet could offer neither 
effectual guidance to the Houses nor intelligible advice 
to the Executive. United responsibility is indispensa- 
ble in Cabinet government, because, without it, such 
government lacks its most admirable and valuable, its 
quintessential feature: namely, responsible leadership. 
Every deliberative body should have an accepted and 
responsible leader, and a legislative body without such 
a leader must dissipate its power like an unbanked 
stream. And a Cabinet that leads must be itself led, 
and act as if with one mind; else legislation will drift 
as helplessly and as carelessly as it does now, under the 
committees, for want of some one influence to guide it. 

A ministry united in action and in responsibility for 
their acts, must, manifestly, rule by debate. ‘Their 
power and success would depend on the ascendency of 
their policy, and the ascendency of their policy would 
depend on the suffrage of the Houses. That policy 
must be vindicated in the eyes of Representatives and 
people alike. Defeat on a measure of importance would 
bring the necessity of resignation, and resignation would 
mean the incoming of the opposition leaders to power 
and authority. Debate would, therefore, of course be 
sought by Ministry and Opposition alike—by the one, 


COLLEGE AND STATE 117 


that the triumph of their party might be approved a 
righteous triumph; by the other, that that triumph 
might be changed into defeat, and they themselves 
snatch victory and command. What greater earnest of 
sincerity and fidelity could there be than such a system 
as this? No minister could afford to ignore his party’s 
pledges. Abandoned party platforms would furnish 
fine material for stout party coffins, and the ranks of 
the Opposition would supply hosts of eager undertakers. 
How could a Cabinet face the ordeal of debate, after 
ignoring its promises and violating its engagements? 
And yet, how could it escape that trial when the Oppo- 
sition were demanding debate, and to decline it would 
be of all confessions the most craven? Always eager 
to assail the ministers, the champions of the Opposition 
would have an unquenchable zeal for the fight, and no 
Ministry could afford to refuse them battle. 

It becomes every citizen to bethink himself how es- 
sential a thing to the preservation of liberty in the re- 
public is free and unrestricted debate in the representa- 
tive body. It requires the fire of the universal criticism 
of the press not only, but the intenser flame of expert 
criticism as well, to test the quality and burn away the 
crudities of measures which have been devised in the 
seclusion of the study, or evolved from the compromises 
of disagreeing committeemen. ‘The press is irresponsi- 
ble, and often—too often—venally partisan. But rep- 
resentatives must criticise legislation in their own 
proper persons, and in the presence of the knowledge 
that constituencies have ears, and that by any blunder 
of judgment, or meanness of sentiment, the fairest repu- 
tation may be stained and the safest prospects blasted. 
It is good for these things to be done in the glare of 
publicity. When legislation consists in the giving of a 
silent judgment upon the suggestions of committees, or 
of caucuses which meet and conclude in privacy, law- 
making may easily become a fraud. A great self-goy- 
erning people should as soon think of entrusting their 


118 COLLEGE AND STATE 


sovereign powers to a secret council, as to a represen- 
tative assembly which refuses to make debate its prin- 
cipal business. It is only when the whole nation is audi- 
ence to their deliberations that legislators will give heed 
to their ways. 

Very much good might be done by insisting upon de- 
bates upon the reports of the standing committees un- 
der our present system. But there is no use insisting. 
No one would care much for such debates. They would 
mean very little. ‘The rejection of a report would have 
no other result than to give its subject-matter back to 
the defeated committee for reconsideration, or, possi- 
bly, to postpone the question indefinitely. The commit- 
tee would not even feel the rebuff. No one committee- 
man would feel responsible for the result. Neither 
party would feel rebuked, for each committee is made 
up of members from both sides of the House. It is 
because of these inconveniences and these feelings that 
committees generally have their own way. It is most 
convenient to let them guide, and little can be gained 
by opposing them. 

There is much object and rare sport, on the other 
hand, in assailing a responsible Ministry. They will die 
game at least. They will not tamely suffer themselves 
to be ousted of their authority. Then, too, they do rep- 
resent a party: they represent the very pick and flower 
of their party. In their defeat or victory, the whole 
army of their co-partisans suffer rout or enjoy success. 
Between the majority whom they represent and the mi- 
nority to whom they are opposed, every debate must be- 
come a contest for ascendency, and the introduction of 
each measure must open up long series of eager and 
anxious combat. 

Here, then, is surely everything that could be de- 
sired in the way of a bit for ugly beast caucus. Party 
interests would constrain the nominating caucus to make 
choice of men fitted for the work of legislation. Ina 
body whose chief function is debate, neither the sup- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 119 


porters nor the opponents of a responsible Cabinet can 
afford to have many weaklings; still less can they afford 
to have spokesmen whose integrity is under a cloud of 
suspicion. Thorough debate can unmask the most 
plausible pretender. The leaders of a great legislative 
assembly must daily show of what mettle they are. Be- 
sides meeting many watchful adversaries in debate, they 
must prove themselves ‘“‘able to guide the House in the 
management of its business, to gain its ear in every 
emergency, to rule it in its hours of excitement.” Rhe- 
torical adroitness, dialectic dexterity, even passionate 
declamation, cannot shield them from the scrutiny to 
which their movements will be subjected at every turn 
of the daily proceedings. The air is too open for either 
stupidity or indirection to thrive. Charlatans cannot 
long play statesmen successfully when the whole coun- 
try is sitting as critic. And in Congress itself a single 
quick and pointed and well-directed question from a 
keen antagonist may utterly betray any minister who 
has aught to conceal. Even business routine will tear 
away any thin covering of plausibility from the shams 
of dishonest policy. There is nothing so wholesome as 
having public servants always on public trial. 

' Since, then, victory must generally rest with those 
who are vigorous in debate and strong in political prin- 
ciple, it would be imperatively necessary for each party 
to keep on the floor of Congress the ablest men they 
could draw into their ranks. To stand the tests of dis- 
cussion they must needs have champions strong of in- 
tellect, pure of reputation, exalted in character, and co- 
gent in speech: and to this imperious necessity beast 
caucus must yield himself subject. Nominating conven- 
tions would hardly dare, under such circumstances, to 
send to Congress scheming wire-pullers or incompetent 
and double-faced tricksters, who would damn their 
party by displays of folly and suspicions of corruption. 
How could such men lead a minority against a powerful 


120 COLLEGE AND STATE 


ministry, or face the bitter taunts of opponents and the 
scornful distrust of fellow-partisans ? 

But more than this: a new caucus-master would be 
raised up in the elevation and instruction of public opin- 
ion. Free and prolonged congressional debates, con- 
ducted on the one side by men eager and able in attack, 
and on the other by men equally quick and strong in 
defense, would do more towards informing and instruct- 
ing public opinion than the press unaided can ever do. 
Men do not often read newspapers which profess po- 
litical doctrines or acknowledge party connections dif- 
ferent from their own. They read altogether on one 
side and they read in colors. No staunch Republican 
paper will often venture to exhibit the flaws in Repub- 
lican principles; and the paper which is not stalwartly 
partisan will surely have a small subscription list. 
Democratic papers must hold up Democratic dogmas in 
the lights most favorable to them, and in such lights 
only, else good Democrats will not patronize them. So 
it is that men read in colors—some in Democratic tints, 
some in Republican tints, a select few in neutral tints, 
and none at all in the clear, dry, uncolored light of 
truth. It must, however, be different were all political 
interest to center in the debates of the legislature. Still 
men would read their party papers as before—perhaps 
even more assiduously and loyally than ever—but into 
whatever paper they might look there must have crept 
therein at least a skeleton of the great debates at the 
capital, and the whole text of the speeches of the party 
leaders; and these would, of course, be carefully scanned 
by every reader who had any thought for the govern- 
ment—as diligently read on the one side as on the other. 
It would be understood by all that on these debates 
hung all the issues of national policy, and that unless 
these tournaments were watched one could not forecast 
anything concerning the political morrow, or think any- 
thing definitely concerning the next campaign. 

How much more information regarding the questions 


COLLEGE AND STATE 121 


of the day can be gained from such debates than from 
the editorials and correspondence of the press! For 
such debates are led by men whose chief business it is 
to study the subjects on which they speak; whose chief 
desire it is to exhibit each topic of discussion in every 
phase that it can possibly assume; whose personal au- 
thority as men of understanding or of reputation de- 
pends on the mastery of principle and of detail they 
display in these legislative contests; whose fame as ora- 
tors depends on the clearness of statement, the cogency 
of reason, the elevation of sentiment, and the ardor of 
patriotism with which they present their cause and en- 
force their principles; and whose success as men of af- 
fairs, whose dearest ambition as public men, must be 
achieved or blasted according as they acquit themselves 
well or ill in the eyes of the nation. Responsible gov- 
ernment would transform Congress into a grand na- 
tional inquisition; for under such a system the ministers 
are always present to be taxed with questions, and no 
detail of administration can be kept back when any 
one in either House chooses to ask about it, and insists 
upon particular information. Are the navy estimates 
before the House? Yonder sits a watchful member 
who has a pigeon-hole in his memory—or, at least, in 
his desk—for all the items of every appropriation bill 
that has been passed during the last ten years; and he 
is on his feet every half hour with several pointed que- 
ries to put to the head of the department. ‘What, 
Mr. Secretary, does this item mean? Is not this a 
much larger amount than we gave you last year for the 
same purpose? Does the Administration mean to put 
the navy on a war footing, that it asks so much? Why 
do you come to us again for money to complete those 
new frigates? How did it happen that your original 
estimates fell so far short? Has there been a sudden 
rise in provisions, that you ask more for victualing the 
fleet this year than you did a year ago? What is the 
idea of the department in buying less ammunition this 


122). COLLEGE AND STATE 


year than heretofore, notwithstanding the fact that you 
are putting more vessels than ever into service?” What 
patience of spirit and diligence in business must Mr. 
Secretary exhibit to reply to all these vexing interroga- 
tions with satisfactory fullness, and at the same time 
with unruffled equanimity! 

Public opinion, informed by such proceedings, could 
easily control, as supreme ‘‘boss,” the “‘bosses’’ of the 
caucus. Whilst the nominating caucus would be 
brought into servitude by such a government, the legis- 
lative caucus would be killed. Its occupation would be 
gone. How could there be any necessity for a party 
often to confer in secret, and constantly to marshal it- 
self for the contests of policy, when under the rec- 
ognized leadership of a Ministry whose principles are 
well known and whose course is easily forecast, or even 
when united and organized in well-understood opposi- 
tion? The occasion for caucus conferences would no 
longer exist. Parties could act in concert without them. 
They could follow distinct lines of policy without resort- 
ing to this clumsy and artificial method of manufactur- 
ing unanimity. [hey would have capable and trust- 
worthy leaders under whom to act, and definite, well- 
recognized principles to advance. ‘They would repre- 
sent ideas; and would not be bent upon being supreme 
for mere supremacy’s sake. 

Of course, no interest is felt now in the debates which 
take place at Washington, because nothing depends 
upon them, and the administration of the government 
is not in the least perceptible degree affected by them. 
No newspaper cares to print even the chief speeches of 
a session, because there are no leaders who speak with 
authority. Seeing this, an observant Englishman—Mr. 
Dale, of Birmingham—has acutely remarked, that ‘‘the 
Americans care very little about politics, but a great 
deal about politicians.”” There are under our system no 
ordinary means by which the national parties can be 
united on grounds of distinct and consistent policy, so 


COLLEGE AND STATE 137 


that there is of course nothing in our political contests 
to excite any lasting interest in the principles involved. 
How can any one be interested in parties that have no 
complexion; which are one thing to-day, another to-mor- 
row, taking their color from the times? Lookers-on 
can understand, however, the aspirations of this or that 
politician for office, and they are interested in the con- 
test. The rivalry is entertaining. The race is diverting 
and exciting. Now and then, it is true, great questions 
do engage the public attention. At some crisis, when 
some overshadowing issue has aroused the sentiment of 
the constituencies and forces itself forward at the elec- 
tion, candidates are asked with interest and emphasis 
what their position is with regard to it. But generally 
politicians need no creed, and can safely rely for success 
on their personal popularity, or on an indefinite thing 
called their ‘‘record.”’ 

But Cabinet government would not only instruct pub- 
lic opinion and elevate Congress into a great delibera- 
tive body; it would also set up a higher standard of ef- 
fectiveness in the executive departments. The minis- 
ters, being also the chief officers of the departments, 
must be able to discern much more readily and clearly 
than could the most diligent and inquisitive standing 
committees, the lines of administration which are prac- 
ticable, and means of management which are available. 
They know the daily perplexities of departmental busi- 
ness, and can appreciate the complexity of the executive 
machinery. ‘hey are in a position to weigh the thou- 
sand minor considerations which must sway the determi- 
nation of administrative officers in the conduct of their 
official business, and have every means of ascertaining 
those necessities of the departments which it is the prov- 
ince of legislation to supply. They are not outsiders, 
as the committees are, and have, therefore, the incalcu- 
lable advantage of knowing both the needs of the de- 
partments and the temper of the assembly they are 
leading; being thus enabled to conform legislation at 


124 COLLEGE AND STATE 


once to the requirements of government, and to the sen- 
timents of the public; to be both prompt and prudent, 
both liberal and economical. 

Nor would such a union of legislative and executive 
functions in a single Cabinet committee either jeopard- 
ize the independence of the Executive, or derogate from 
the privileges of the Legislature. As chiefs of the 
executive bureau, the ministers would have a personal 
interest in preserving the prerogatives of the Executive; 
and as official leaders of their party in Congress, they 
would be zealous to protect the rights and vindicate the 
authority of the Houses. ‘They would not infringe the 
powers of the Executive, and they could not coerce Con- 
gress if they would. They would be simply the intelli- 
gent counselors of the latter, not its masters; its ac- 
countable guides and servants, not its autocrats. 

Even the imperfect view of the conditions of Cabinet 
government that I have been able to give here in these 
limited magazine spaces is sufficient to make it clear 
why the establishment of such a system in this country 
would necessitate a lengthening of the legislative term. 
Biennial elections to the lower House serve well enough 
under our present form of government. Even the oft- 
repeated contests for the Speakership, and the frequent 
reconstructions of the committees which are attendant 
upon the reorganizations of the House; even the inse- 
curity of tenure which makes the representative office 
a station less of usefulness than of profit, and the de- 
rangements of business which are incident upon quick 
_tecurring elections, do not altogether condemn the sys- 
tem. It is well enough that representatives should 
have a continuing sense of constant dependence on the 
approving judgments of their constituents. If there is 
to be no other feature of responsibility than this in our 
government, by all means let this be retained. But with 
Cabinet government, biennial elections would prove a 
source of too great instability. Each election would de- 
cide an issue between parties; would determine which 


‘COLLEGE AND STATE 125 


should have power and enjoy ascendency; and no Min- 
istry would care to inaugurate a policy which might be 
broken down at the end of two years. A Cabinet com- 
ing into office at a crisis, or bringing with them many 
promises of great things to be accomplished, might be 
ousted at the end of two brief years, before their 
schemes had fairly matured, by a wave of opposition 
raised by the natural and transient disappointment of 
the country, that everything promised had not already 
been done. Ministers would not plan for so short a 
future. hey would not have the nerve. They would 
legislate from hand to mouth. ‘‘A mind free from the 
sense of insecurity is as necessary for great works of 
statesmanship as for great works of poetry.’ Biennial 
elections would be too much like biennial convulsions. 
Their quick recurrence would keep the country in a 
fever of political excitement, which would either warm 
into riot or waste into exhaustion and indifference. 

With the responsible chiefs of administration always 
under the public eye, the permanence and success of civil 
service reform ought to be assured. ‘They could be 
cited for every violation of its principles, and for every 
deviation from its proper practices. Their own mastery 
would depend upon the efficiency of the administration, 
and the efficiency of the administration would depend 
upon the maintenance of true business principles in the 
manning of the departments; or, in other words, upon 
the rigid observance of the doctrines of civil service re- 
form. 

The uncertainty of their own tenure of office would 
offer no contradiction to these doctrines. Beyond ques- 
tion, the greater part of the affairs of the departments 
is altogether outside of politics. ‘The collection and or- 
dinary disbursements of the revenue, the general super- 
intendence of the army and navy, the regulation of the 
mail service, the administration of justice—all the usual 
and daily functions of the executive departments—what 
concern have they with party questions? In these things 


126 COLLEGE AND STATE 


business capacity and honest diligence are all that are 
wanted. Political belief does not affect an officer’s ef- 
ficiency any more than his religious belief might. This 
is the oft-established principle which lies at the source 
of the great movement towards civil service reform, in 
which all the currents of public opinion are now united, 
in a tide before which the stoutest dykes of party cus- 
tom and party interest have gone down. It is now uni- 
versally seen and acknowledged that the public service 
to be efficient should be non-partisan; and that so far as 
the nation at large is concerned, it can make no possible 
difference whether the rank and file of its servants en- 
tertain this, that, or the other political creed. Not in 
one office out of five thousand can opinion affect a man’s 
value as a business agent of the government. But there 
are executive offices which are political. Those minis- 
ters who direct the general policy of the government— 
if any such there be—must represent the party domi- 
nant in the State, just as the standing committees which 
now stand in the place of such ministers are, properly 
and as a matter of course, representatives of the ruling 
majority. 

Much might be made of the objection that ministers 
acting thus as both executive officers and legislative 
leaders, absorbed as they would be in the business of 
the Houses and in the marshaling of their party forces 
in the daily tilt of debate, could not have the leisure to 
master properly their duties as heads of the depart- 
ments, and would inevitably fall short of fulfilling their 
official trusts. This objection is an evident and a 
weighty one. It must, however, be remembered at 
every turn in the endeavor to solve this tremendous 
and perplexing problem of government, that we are 
commanded by the inexorable necessity of compromise. 
We must take the least imperfect thing we can get; and 
surely it is far better to have the business of the execu- 
tive departments directed by men who know something 
of their interests, rather than by men who know noth- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 127 


ing of those interests: by men who are in constant, inti- 
mate, and authoritative communication with subordi- 
nates who spend their lives in close and exclusive atten- 
tion to departmental affairs, rather than by men who 
can command no such means of information; by men 
whose personal interests, nay, whose very ambition, must 
unite them in behalf of good administration; and who 
are able, therefore, and willing to agree upon a definite, 
uniform, and consistent policy, rather than by several 
scores of men divided into numerous, disconnected, and 
inharmonious committees who cannot cooperate, and 
who are only too often indifferent as to the results of 
measures they ignorantly recommend. 

So long as we have representative government, so 
long will the Legislature remain the imperial and all- 
overshadowing power of the State: and so long as it 
does remain such a power, it will be impossible to check 
its encroachments and curb its arrogance, and at the 
same time preserve the independence of the Executive, 
without joining these two great branches of government 
by some link, some bond of connection, which, whilst 
not consolidating them, will at least neutralize their an- 
tagonisms, and, possibly, harmonize their interests. A 
Cabinet-committee would constitute such a bond; for it 
would, as we have seen, be a body which, from its very 
nature and offices, would be at once jealous of the pre- 
tensions of the Houses and responsible for the usurpa- 
tions of the Executive; interested, and therefore deter- 
mined, to yield not a jot of their lawful executive au- 
thority, and yet bound to admit every just claim of 
power on the part of their legislative colleagues. _ 

That must be a policy of wisdom and prudence which 
puts the executive and legislative departments of gov- 
ernment into intimate sympathy, and binds them to- 
gether in close codperation. The system which em- 
bodies such a policy in its greatest perfection must be 
admired of all statesmen and coveted of all misgov- 
erned peoples. The object of wise legislation is the 


128 COLLEGE AND STATE 


establishment of equal rights and liberties amongst the 
citizens of the State, and its chief business, the best ad- 
ministration of government. Legislatures have it con- 
stantly in charge, and specially in charge, to facilitate 
administration: and that charge can be best fulfilled, 
of course, when those who make and those who admin- 
ister the laws are in closest harmony. ‘The executive 
agents of government should stand at the ear of the 
Legislature with respectful suggestions of the needs of 
the administration, and the Legislature should give heed 
to them, requiring of them, the while, obedience and 
diligence in the execution of its designs. An Executive 
honored with the confidence of the Legislature, and a 
Legislature confiding itself with all fullness of trust, yet 
with all vigilance, to the guidance of an Executive ac- 
knowledging full responsibility to the representatives of 
the people for all its acts and all its counsels: this is 
a picture good to look upon—a type of effective and 
beneficent self-government. ‘The changes in our form 
of government which the establishment of such a system 
would involve are surely worth making if they necessi- 
tate no sacrifice of principle. 

It cannot be too often repeated, that while Congress 
remains the supreme power of the State, it is idle to 
talk of steadying or cleansing our politics without in 
some way linking together the interests of the Execu- 
tive and the Legislature. So long as these two great 
branches are isolated, they must be ineffective just to 
the extent of the isolation. Congress will always be 
master, and will always enforce its commands on the 
administration. The only wise plan, therefore, is to fa- 
cilitate its direction of the government, and to make 
it at the same time responsible, in the persons of its 
leaders, for its acts of control, and for the manner in 
which its plans and commands are executed. The 
only hope of wrecking the present clumsy misrule of 
Congress lies in the establishment of responsible Cabi- 
net government. Let the interests of the Legislature 


COLLEGE AND STATE 129 


be indissolubly linked with the interests of the Execu- 
tive. Let those who have authority to direct the course 
of legislation be those who have a deep personal con- 
cern in building up the executive departments in eftfec- 
tiveness, in strengthening law, and in unifying policies; 
men whose personal reputation depends upon successful 
administration, whose public station originates in the 
triumph of principles, and whose dearest ambition it is 
to be able to vindicate their wisdom and maintain their 
integrity. 

Committee government is too clumsy and too clan- 
destine a system to last. Other methods of government 
must sooner or later be sought, and a different economy 
established. First or last, Congress must be organized 
in conformity with what is now the prevailing legislative 
practice of the world. English precedent and the 
world’s fashion must be followed in the institution of 
Cabinet government in the United States. 


THE STUDY OF ADMINISTRATION 


WRITTEN WHILE MR. WILSON WAS A TEACHER AT BRYN 
MAWR. FROM THE “POLITICAL SCIENCE QUAR- 
TERLY,’’ JUNE, 1887, VOL) 11) PPW19 7-222) 


I SUPPOSE that no practical science is ever studied 
where there is no need to know it. ‘The very fact, 
therefore, that the eminently practical science of admin- 
istration is finding its way into college courses in this 
country would prove that this country needs to know 
more about administration, were such proof of the fact 
required to make out a case. It need not be said, how- 
ever, that we do not look into college programmes for 
proof of this fact. It is a thing almost taken for 
granted among us, that the present movement called 
civil service reform must, after the accomplishment of 
its first purpose, expand into eftorts to improve, not the 
personnel only, but also the organization and methods 
of our government offices: because it is plain that their 
organization and methods need improvement only less 
than their personnel. It is the object of administrative 
study to discover, first, what government can properly 
and successfully do, and, secondly, how it can do these 
proper things with the utmost possible efficiency and at 
the least possible cost either of money or of energy. 
On both these points there is obviously much need of 
light among us; and only careful study can supply that 
light. 

Before entering on that study, however, it is needful: 

I. To take same account of what others have done 
in the same line; that is to say, of the history of the 
study. 

Il. To ascertain just what is its subject-matter. 

130 


COLLEGE AND STATE 131 


III. To determine just what are the best methods 
by which to develop it, and the most clarifying political 
conceptions to carry with us into it. 

Unless we know and settle these things, we shall set 
out without chart or compass. 


I. 


The science of administration is the latest fruit of 
that study of the science of politics which was begun 
some twenty-two hundred years ago. It is a birth of 
our own century, almost of our own generation. 

Why was it so lafe in coming? Why did it wait till 
this too busy century of ours to demand attention for 
itself? Administration is the most obvious part of 
government; it is government in action; it is the execu- 
tive, the operative, the most visible side of government, 
and is of course as old as government itself. It is 
government in action, and one might very naturally 
expect to find that government in action had arrested 
the attention and provoked the scrutiny of writers of 
politics very early in the history of systematic thought. 

But such was not the case. No one wrote system- 
atically of administration as a branch of the science of 
government until the present century had passed its 
first youth and had begun to put forth its characteristic 
flower of systematic knowledge. Up to our own day 
all the political writers whom we now read had thought, 
argued, dogmatized only about the constitution of gov- 
ernment; about the nature of the state, the essence and 
seat of sovereignty, popular power and kingly prerog- 
ative; about the greatest meanings lying at the heart 
of government, and the high ends set before the purpose 
of government by man’s nature and man’s aims. The 
central field of controversy was that great field of 
theory in which monarchy rode tilt against democracy, 
in which oligarchy would have built for itself strong- 
holds of privilege, and in which tyranny sought oppor- 


132 COLLEGE AND STATE 


tunity to make good its claim to receive submission 
from all competitors. Amidst this high warfare of 
principles, administration could command no pause for 
its own consideration. ‘The question was always: Who 
shall make law, and what shall that law be? ‘The 
other question, how law should be administered with 
enlightenment, with equity, with speed, and without 
friction, was put aside as “practical detail’’ which 
clerks could arrange after doctors had agreed upon 
principles. 

That political philosophy took this direction was of 
course no accident, no chance preference or perverse 
whim of political philosophers. The philosophy of 
any time is, as Hegel says, “nothing but the spirit of 
that time expressed in abstract thought’’; and political 
philosophy, like philosophy of every other kind, has 
only held up the mirror to contemporary affairs. The 
trouble in early times was almost altogether about the 
constitution of government; and consequently that was 
what engrossed men’s thoughts. There was little or no 
trouble about administration,—at least little that was 
heeded by administrators. ‘The functions of govern- 
ment were simple, because life itself was simple. Gov- 
ernment went about imperatively and compelled men, 
without thought of consulting their wishes. ‘There 
was no complex system of public revenues and public 
debts to puzzle financiers; there were, consequently, 
no financiers to be puzzled. No one who possessed 
power was long at a loss how to use it. The great and 
only question was: Who shall possess it? Populations 
were of manageable numbers; property was of simple 
sorts. There were plenty of farms, but no stocks and 
bonds; more cattle than vested interests. 

I have said that all this was true of ‘‘early times”; 
but it was substantially true also of comparatively late 
times. One does not have to look back of the last 
century for the beginnings of the present complexities 
of trade and perplexities of commercial speculation, 


COLLEGE AND STATE 133 


nor for the portentous birth of national debts. Good 
Queen Bess, doubtless, thought that the monopolies 
of the sixteenth century were hard enough to handle 
without burning her hands; but they are not remem- 
bered in the presence of the giant monopolies of the 
nineteenth century. When Blackstone lamented that 
corporations had no bodies to be kicked and no souls 
to be damned, he was anticipating the proper time for 
such regrets by full a century. The perennial discords 
between master and workmen which now so often dis- 
turb industrial society began before the Black Death 
and the Statute of Laborers; but never before our own 
day did they assume such ominous proportions as they 
wear now. In brief, if difficulties of governmental 
action are to be seen gathering in other centuries, they 
are to be seen culminating in our own. 

This is the reason why administrative tasks have 
nowadays to be so studiously and systematically ad- 
justed to carefully tested standards of policy, the rea- 
son why we are having now what we never had before, 
a science of administration. The weightier debates of 
constitutional principle are even yet by no means con- 
cluded; but they are no longer of more immediate 
practical moment than questions of administration. It 
is getting to be harder to run a constitution than to 
frame one. 

Here is Mr. Bagehot’s graphic, whimsical way of 
depicting the difference between the old and the new 
in administration: 


In early times, when a despot wishes to govern a distant province, 
he sends down a satrap on a grand horse, and other people on little 
horses; and very little is heard of the satrap again unless he send 
back some of the little people to tell what he has been doing. No 
great labour of superintendence is possible. Common rumour and 
casual report are the sources of intelligence. If it seems certain that 
the province is in a bad state, satrap No. 1 is recalled, and satrap 
No. 2 sent out in his stead. In civilized countries the process is 
different. You erect a bureau in the province you want to govern; 
you make it write letters and copy letters; it sends home eight 


134 COLLEGE AND STATE 


reports per diem to the head bureau in St. Petersburg. Nobody does 
a sum in the province without some one doing the same sum in the 
capital, to “check” him, and see that he does it correctly. ‘The con- 
sequence of this is, to throw on the heads of departments an amount 
of reading and labour which can only be accomplished by the greatest 
natural aptitude, the most efficient training, the most firm and regular 
industry.” 


There is scarcely a single duty of government which 
was once simple which is not now complex; government 
once had but a few masters; it now has scores of mas- 
ters. Majorities formerly only underwent govern-| 
ment; they now conduct government. Where govern-| 
ment once might follow the whims of a court, it must 
now follow the views of a nation. 

And those views are steadily widening to new con- 
ceptions of state duty; so that, at the same time that 
the functions of government are every day becoming 
more complex and difficult, they are also vastly multi- 
plying in number. Administration is everywhere put- 
ting its hands to new undertakings. ‘The utility, cheap- 
ness, and success of the government’s postal service, 
for instance, point towards the early establishment of 
governmental control of the telegraph system. Or, 
even if our government is not to follow the lead of the 
governments of Europe in buying or building both tele- 
graph and railroad lines, no one can doubt that in 
some way it must make itself master of masterful cor- 
porations. ‘The creation of national commissioners of 
railroads, in addition to the older state commissions, 
involves a very important and delicate extension of 
administrative functions. Whatever hold of authority 
state or federal governments are to take upon corpora- 
tions, there must follow cares and responsibilities 
which will require not a little wisdom, knowledge, and 
experience. Such things must be studied in order to 
be well done. And these, as I have said, are only a 
few of the doors which are being opened to offices 


*Essay on Sir William Pitt. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 135 


of government. The idea of the state and the conse- 
quent ideal of its duty are undergoing noteworthy 
change; and ‘the idea of the state is the conscience of 
administration.” Seeing every day new things which 
the state ought to do, the next thing is to see clearly 
how it ought to do them. 

This is why there should be a science of administra- 
tion which shall seek to straighten the paths of govern- 
ment, to make its business less unbusinesslike; to 
strengthen and purify its organization, and to crown 
its duties with dutifulness. This is one reason why 
there is such a science. 

But where has this science grown up? Surely not 
on this side the sea. Not much impartial scientific 
method is to be discerned in our administrative prac- 
tices. The poisonous atmosphere of city government, 
the crooked secrets of state administration, the con- 
fusion, sinecurism, and corruption ever and again dis- 
covered in the bureaus at Washington forbid us to 
believe that any clear conceptions of what constitutes 
good administration are as yet very widely current in 
the United States. No; American writers have hith- 
erto taken no very important part in the advancement 
of this science. It has found its doctors in Europe. It 
is not of our making; it is a foreign science, speaking 
very little of the language of English or American 
principle. It employs only foreign tongues; it utters 
none but what are to our minds alien ideas. Its aims, 
its examples, its conditions, are almost exclusively 
grounded in the histories of foreign races, in the prec- 
edents of foreign systems, in the lessons of foreign 
revolutions. It has been developed by French and 
German professors, and is consequently in all parts 
adapted to the needs of a compact state, and made to 
fit highly centralized forms of government; whereas, 
to answer our purposes, it must be adapted, not to a 
simple and compact, but to a complex and multiform 
state, and made to fit highly decentralized forms of 


136 COLLEGE AND STATE 


government. If we would employ it, we must Ameri- 
canize it, and that not formally, in language merely, 
but radically, in thought, principle, and aim as well. 
It must learn our constitutions by heart; must get the 
bureaucratic fever out of its veins; must inhale much 
free American air. 

If an explanation be sought why a science manifestly 
so susceptible of being made useful to all governments 
alike should have received attention first in Europe, 
where government has long been a monopoly, rather 
than in England or the United States, where govern- 
ment has long been a common franchise, the reason 
will doubtless be found to be twofold: first, that in 
Europe, just because government was independent of 
popular assent, there was more governing to be done; 
and, second, that the desire to keep government a 
monopoly made the monopolists interested in discover- 
ing the least irritating means of governing. They were, 
besides, few enough to adopt means promptly. 

It will be instructive to look into this matter a little 
more closely. In speaking of European governments 
I do not, of course, include England. She has not 
refused to change with the times. She has simply 
tempered the severity of the transition from a polity 
of aristocratic privilege to a system of democratic 
power by slow measures of constitutional reform 
which, without preventing revolution, has confined it 
to paths of peace. But the countries of the continent 
for a long time desperately struggled against all change, 
and would have diverted revolution by softening the 
asperities of absolute government. ‘They sought so 
to perfect their machinery as to destroy all wearing 
friction, so to sweeten their methods with considera- 
tion for the interests of the governed as to placate all 
hindering hatred, and so assiduously and opportunely 
to offer their aid to all classes of undertakings as to 
render themselves indispensable to the industrious. 
They did at last give the people constitutions and the 


COLLEGE AND STATE 137 


franchise; but even after that they obtained leave to 
. continue despotic by becoming paternal. ‘They made 
themselves too efficient to be dispensed with, too 
smoothly operative to be noticed, too enlightened to 
be inconsiderately questioned, too benevolent to be 
suspected, too powerful to be coped with. All this 
has required study; and they have closely studied it. 

On this side the sea we, the while, had known no 
great difficulties of government. With a new coun- 
try, in which there was room and remunerative em- 
ployment for everybody, with liberal principles of 
government and unlimited skill in practical politics, 
we were long exempted from the need of being anx- 
iously careful about plans and methods of administra- 
tion. We have naturally been slow to see the use or 
significance of those many volumes of learned research 
and painstaking examination into the ways and means 
of conducting government which the presses of Europe 
have been sending to our libraries. Like a lusty child, 
government with us has expanded in nature and grown 
great in stature, but has also become awkward in 
movement. [he vigor and increase of its life have been 
altogether out of proportion to its skill in living. It 
has gained strength, but it has not acquired deport- 
ment. Great, therefore, as has been our advantage 
over the countries of Europe in point of ease and health 
of constitutional development, now that the time for 
more careful administrative adjustments and larger 
administrative knowledge has come to us, we are at 
a signal disadvantage as compared with the transatlan- 
tic nations; and this for reasons which I shall try to 
make clear. 

Judging by the constitutional histories of the chief 
nations of the modern world, there may be said to be 
three periods of growth through which government 
has passed in all the most highly developed of existing 
systems, and through which it promises to pass in all 
the rest. The first of these periods is that of absolute « 


as 


138 COLLEGE AND STATE 


rulers, and of an administrative system adapted to» 
absolute rule; the second is that in which constitutions * 
are framed to do away with absolute rulers and sub- 
stitute popular control, and in which administration is 
neglected for these higher concerns; and the third is 
that in which the sovereign people undertake to de- 
velop administration under this new constitution which 
has brought them into power. 

Those governments are now in the lead in adminis- 
trative practice which had rulers still absolute but also 
enlightened when those modern days of political illu- 
mination came in which it was made evident to all but 
the blind that governors are properly only the servants 
of the governed. In such governments administration 
has been organized to subserve the general weal with 
the simplicity and effectiveness vouchsafed only to the 
undertakings of a single will. 

Such. was the case in Prussia, for instance, where 
administration has been most studied and most nearly 
perfected. Frederick the Great, stern and masterful 
as was his rule, still sincerely professed to regard him- 
self as only the chief servant of the state, to consider 
his great office a public trust; and it was he who, build- 
ing upon the foundations laid by his father, began to 
organize the public service of Prussia as in very earnest 
a service of the public. His no less absolute successor, 
Frederic William III, under the inspiration of Stein, 
again, in his turn, advanced the work still further, 
planning many of the broader structural features which 
give firmness and form to Prussian administration to- 
day. Almost the whole of the admirable system has 
been developed by kingly initiative. 

Of similar origin was the practice, if not the plan, 
of modern French administration, with its symmetrical 
divisions of territory and its orderly gradations of 
office. The days of the Revolution — of the Constitu- 
ent Assembly — were days of constitution-writing, but 

» they can hardly be called days of constitution-making. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 139 


The Revolution heralded a period of constitutional 
development,—the entrance of France upon the second 
of those periods which I have enumerated,—but it 
did not itself inaugurate such a period. It interrupted 
and unsettled absolutism, but did not destroy it. Na- 
poleon succeeded the monarchs of France, to exercise 
a power as unrestricted as they had ever possessed. 

The recasting of French administration by Napoleon 
is, therefore, my second example of the perfecting of® 
civil machinery by the single will of an absolute ruler 
before the dawn of a constitutional era. No corpor- 
ate, popular will could ever have effected arrange- 
ments such as those which Napoleon commanded. 
Arrangements so simple at the expense of local prej- 
udice, so logical in their indifference to popular choice, 
might be decreed by a Constituent Assembly, but could 
be established only by the unlimited authority of a des- 
pot. The system of the year VIII was ruthlessly 
thorough and heartlessly perfect. It was, besides, in 
large part, a return to the despotism that had been 
overthrown. | 

Among those nations, on the other hand, which 
entered upon a season of constitution-making and popu- 
lar reform before administration had received the im- 
press of liberal principle, administrative improvement 
has been tardy and half-done. Once a nation has em- 
barked in the business of manufacturing constitutions, 
it finds it exceedingly difficult to close out that business 
and open for the public a bureau of skilled, economical 
administration. There seems to be no end to the 
tinkering of constitutions. Your ordinary constitution 
will last you hardly ten years without repairs or addi- 
tions; and the time for administrative detail comes 
late. 

Here, of course, our examples are England and our 
own country. In the days of the Angevin kings, before 
constitutional life had taken root in the Great Charter, 
legal and administrative reforms began to proceed with 


140 COLLEGE AND STATE 


sense and vigor under the impulse of Henry II’s 
shrewd, busy, pushing, indomitable spirit and purpose; 
and kingly initiative seemed destined in England, as 
elsewhere, to shape governmental growth at its will. 
But impulsive, errant Richard and weak, despicable 
John were not the men to carry out such schemes as 
their father’s. Administrative development gave 
place in their reigns to constitutional struggles; and Par- 
liament became king before any English monarch had 
had the practical genius or the enlightened conscience 
to devise just and lasting forms for the civil service of 
the state. 

The English race, consequently, has long and suc- 
cessfully studied the art of curbing executive power to 
the constant neglect of the art of perfecting executive 
methods. It has exercised itself much more in control- 
ling than in energizing government. It has been more 
concerned to render government just and moderate ® 
than to make it facile, well-ordered, and effective. Eng- 
lish and American political history has been a history, 
not of administrative development, but of legislative 
oversight,—not of progress in governmental organiza- 
tion, but of advance in law-making and political criti- 
cism. Consequently, we have reached a time when ad- 
ministrative study and creation are imperatively neces- 
sary to the well-being of our governments saddled with 
the habits of a long period of constitution-making. 
That period has practically closed, so far as the estab- 
lishment of essential principles is concerned, but we 
cannot shake off its atmosphere. We go on criticizing 
when we ought to be creating. We have reached the 
third of the periods I have mentioned,—the period, 
namely, when the people have to develop administration 
in accordance with the constitutions they won for them- 
selves in a previous period of struggle with absolute 
power; but we are not prepared for the tasks of the 
new period. 

Such an explanation seems to afford the only escape 


COLLEGE AND STATE 141 


from blank astonishment at the fact that, in spite of 
our vast advantages in point of political liberty, and 
above all in point of practical political skill and sagac- 
ity, so many nations are ahead of us in administrative 
organization and administrative skill. Why, for in- 
stance, have we but just begun purifying a civil service 
which was rotten full fifty years ago? To say that 
slavery diverted us is but to repeat what I have said— 
that flaws in our Constitution delayed us. 

Of course all reasonable preference would declare 
for this English and American course of politics rather 
than for that of any European country. We should 
not like to have had Prussia’s history for the sake of 
having Prussia’s administrative skill; and Prussia’s par- 
ticular system of administration would quite suffocate 
us. It is better to be untrained and free than to be 
servile and systematic. Still there is no denying that 
it would be better yet to be both free in spirit and 
proficient in practice. It is this even more reasonable 
preference which impels us to discover what there may 
be to hinder or delay us in naturalizing this much-to-be- 
desired science of administration. 

What, then, is there to prevent? 

Well, principally, popular sovereignty. It is harder 
for democracy to organize administration than for 
monarchy. ‘The very completeness of our most cher- 
ished political successes in the past embarrasses us. 
We have enthroned public opinion; and it is forbidden 
us to hope during its reign for any quick schooling of 
the sovereign in executive expertness or in the condi- 
tions of perfect functional balance in government. The 
very fact that we have realized popular rule in its ful- 
ness has made the task of organizing that rule just so 
much the more difficult. In order to make any advance 
at all we must instruct and persuade a multitudinous 
monarch called public opinion,x—a much less feasible 
undertaking than to influence a single monarch called 
a king. An individual sovereign will adopt a simple 


142 COLLEGE AND STATE 


plan and carry it out directly: he will have but one opin- 
ion, and he will embody that one opinion in one com- 
mand. But this other sovereign, the people, will have 
a score of differing opinions. ‘They can agree upon 
nothing simple: advance must be made through com- 
promise, by a compounding of differences, by a trim- 
ming of plans and a suppression of too straightforward 
principles. ‘There will be a succession of resolves run- 
ning through a course of years, a dropping fire of com- 
mands running through a whole gamut of modifications. 
In government, as in virtue, the hardest of hard 
things is to make progress. Formerly the reason for 
this was that the single person who was sovereign was 
generally either selfish, ignorant, timid, or a fool,— 
albeit there was now and again one who was wise. 
Nowadays the reason is that the many, the people, who 
are sovereign have no single ear which one can 
approach, and are selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or 
foolish with the selfishnesses, the ignorances, the stub- 
bornnesses, the timidities, or the follies of several thou- 
sand persons,—albeit there are hundreds who are wise. 
Once the advantage of the reformer was that the sover- 
eign’s mind had a definite locality, that it was contained 
itt one man’s head, and that consequently it could be got- 
ten at; though it was his disadvantage that that mind 
learned only reluctantly or only in small quantities, or 
was under the influence of some one who let it learn 
only the wrong things. Now, on the contrary, the 
reformer is bewildered by the fact that the sovereign’s 
mind has no definite locality, but is contained in a vot- 
ing majority of several million heads; and embarrassed 
by the fact that the mind of this sovereign also is 
under the influence of favorites, who are none the 
less favorites in a good old-fashioned sense of the word 
because they are not persons but preconceived opin- 
ions; i.e., prejudices which are not to be reasoned with 
because they are not the children of reason. 
Wherever regard for public opinion is a first prin- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 143 


ciple of government, practical reform must be slow and 
all reform must be full of compromises. For wher- 
ever public opinion exists it must rule. ‘This is now an 
axiom half the world over, and will presently come to 
be believed even in Russia. Whoever would effect a 
change in a modern constitutional government must 
first educate his fellow-citizens to want some change. 
That done, he must persuade them to want the partic- 
ular change he wants. He must first make public opin- 
ion willing to listen and then see to it that it listen to 
the right things. He must stir it up to search for an 
opinion, and then manage to put the right opinion in its 
way. 

The first step is not less difficult than the second. 
With opinions, possession is more than nine points of 
the law. It is next to impossible to dislodge them. 
Institutions which one generation regards as only a 
makeshift approximation to the realization of a prin- 
ciple, the next generation honors as the nearest possible 
approximation to that principle, and the next worships 
as the principle itself. It takes scarcely three genera- 
tions for the apotheosis. ‘The grandson accepts his 
grandfather’s hesitating experiment as an integral part 
of the fixed constitution of nature. 

Even if we had clear insight into all the political 
past, and could form out of perfectly instructed heads 
a few steady, infallible, placidly wise maxims of govern- 
ment into which all sound political doctrine would be 
ultimately resolvable, would the country act on them? 
That is the question. The bulk of mankind is rigidly 
unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind 
votes. A truth must become not only plain but also 
commonplace before it will be seen by the people who 
go to their work very early in the morning; and not 
to act upon it must involve great and pinching incon- 
veniences before these same people will make up their 
minds to act upon it. 

And where is this unphilosophical bulk of mankind 


~ 


144 COLLEGE AND STATE 


more multifarious in its composition than in the United 
States? To know the public mind of this country, one 
must know the mind, not of Americans of the older 
stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of 
negroes. In order to get a footing for new doctrine, 
one must influence minds cast in every mould of race, 
minds inheriting every bias of environment, warped by 
the histories of a score of different nations, warmed or 
chilled, closed or expanded by almost every climate of 
the globe. 

So much, then, for the history of the study of admin- 
istration, and the peculiarly difficult conditions under 
which, entering upon it when we do, we must undertake 
it. What, now, is the subject-matter of this study, and 
what are its characteristic objects? 


jt. 


The field of administration is a field of business. It 
is removed from the hurry and strife of politics; it at 
most points stands apart even from the debatable 
ground of constitutional study. It is a part of political 
life only as the methods of the counting-house are a part 
of the life of society; only as machinery is part of the 
manufactured product. But it is, at the same time, 
raised very far above the dull level of mere technical 
detail by the fact that through its greater principles it 
is directly connected with the lasting maxims of politi- 
cal wisdom, the permanent truths of political progress. 

The object of administrative study is to rescue execu- 
tive methods from the confusion and costliness of em- 
pirical experiment and set them upon foundations laid 
deep in stable principle. 

It is for this reason that we must regard civil service 
reform in its present stages as but a prelude to a fuller 
administrative reform. We are now rectifying 
methods of appointment; we must go on to adjust 
executive functions more fitly and to prescribe better 


COLLEGE AND STATE 145 


methods of executive organization and action. Civil 
service reform is thus but a moral preparation for 
what is to follow. It is clearing the moral atmosphere 
of official life by establishing the sanctity of public office 
as a public trust, and, by making the service unpartisan, 
it is opening the way for making it businesslike. By 
sweetening its motives it is rendering it capable of im- 
proving its methods of work. 

Let me expand a little what I have said of the prov- 
ince of administration. Most important to be ob- 
served is the truth already so much and so fortunately 
insisted upon by our civil service reformers; namely, 
that administration lies outside the proper sphere of 
politics. Administrative questions are not political 
questions. Although politics sets the tasks for admin- 
istration, it should not be suffered to manipulate its 
offices. 

This is distinction of high authority; eminent Ger- 
man writers insist upon it as of course. Bluntschli,? 
for instance, bids us separate administration alike from 
politics and from law. Politics, he says, is state ac- 
tivity ‘‘in things great and universal,” while ‘‘adminis- 
tration, on the other hand,” is “‘the activity of the state 
in individual and small things. Politics is thus the 
special province of the statesman, administration of 
the technical official.” ‘Policy does nothing without 
the aid of administration’; but administration is not 
therefore politics. But we do not require German 
authority for this position; this discrimination between 
administration and politics is now, happily, too obvious 
to need further discussion. 

There is another distinction which must be worked 
into all our conclusions, which, though but another 
side of that between administration and politics, is not 
quite so easy to keep sight of; I mean the distinction 
between constitutional and administrative questions, 
between those governmental adjustments which are 


* Politik, S. 467. 


146 COLLEGE AND STATE 


essential to constitutional principle and those which are 
merely instrumental to the possibly changing purposes 
of a wisely adapting convenience. 

One cannot easily make clear to every one just where 
administration resides in the various departments of 
any practicable government without entering upon par- 
ticulars so numerous as to confuse and distinctions so 
minute as to distract. No lines of demarcation, setting 
apart administrative from non-administrative func- 
tions, can be run between this and that department of 
government without being run up hill and down dale, 
over dizzy heights of distinction and through dense 
jungles of statutory enactment, hither and thither 
around “‘ifs’? and ‘“‘buts,’’ ‘‘whens’” and ‘‘howevers,”’ 
until they become altogether lost to the common eye 
not accustomed to this sort of surveying, and conse- 
quently not acquainted with the use of the theodolite 
of logical discernment. A great deal of administra- 
tion goes about incognito to most of the world, being 
confounded now with political ‘management,’ and 
again with constitutional principle. 

Perhaps this ease of confusion may explain such 
utterances as that of Niebuhr’s: “Liberty,” he says, 
‘‘depends incomparably more upon administration than 
upon constitution.” At first sight this appears to be 
largely true. Apparently facility in the actual exercise 
of liberty does depend more upon administrative ar- 
rangements than upon constitutional guarantees; al- 
though constitutional guarantees alone secure the 
existence of liberty. But—upon second thought—is 
even so much as this true? Liberty no more consists 
in easy functional movement than intelligence consists 
in the ease and vigor with which the limbs of a strong 
man move. The principles that rule within the man, 
or the constitution, are the vital springs of liberty or 
servitude. Because dependence and subjection are with- 
out chains, are lightened by every easy-working device 
of considerate, paternal government, they are not 


COLLEGE AND STATE 147 


thereby transformed into liberty. Liberty cannot live 
apart from constitutional principle; and no administra- 
tion, however perfect and liberal its methods, can give 
men more than a poor counterfeit of liberty if it rest 
upon illiberal principles of government. 

A clear view of the difference between the province 
of constitutional law and the province of administra- 
tive function ought to leave no room for misconcep- 
tion; and it is possible to name some roughly definite 
criteria upon which such a view can be built. Public 
administration is detailed and systematic execution of 
public law. Every particular application of general 
law is an act of administration. ‘he assessment and 
raising of taxes, for instance, the hanging of a criminal, 
the transportation and delivery of the mails, the equip- 
ment and recruiting of the army and navy, etc., are all 
obviously acts of administration; but the general laws 
which direct these things to be done are as obviously 
outside of and above administration. ‘The broad plans 
of governmental action are not administrative; the de- 
tailed execution of such plans is administrative. Con- 
stitutions, therefore, properly concern themselves only 
with those instrumentalities of government which are 
to control general law. Our federal Constitution ob- 
serves this principle in saying nothing of even the 
greatest of the purely executive offices, and speaking 
only of that President of the Union who was to share 
the legislative and policy-making functions of govern- 
ment, only of those judges of highest jurisdiction who 
were to interpret and guard its principles, and not of 
those who were merely to give utterance to them. 

This is not quite the distinction between Will and 
answering Deed, because the administrator should have 
and does have a will of his own in the choice of means 
for accomplishing his work. He is not and ought not 
to be a mere passive instrument. The distinction is 
between general plans and special means. 

There is, indeed, one point at which administrative 


148 COLLEGE AND STATE 


studies trench on constitutional ground—or at least 
upon what seems constitutional ground. The study of 
administration, philosophically viewed, is closely con- 
nected with the study of the proper distribution of con- 
stitutional authority. To be efficient it must discover 
the simplest arrangements by which responsibility can 
be unmistakably fixed upon officials; the best way of 
dividing authority without hampering it, and responsi- 
bility without obscuring it. And this question of the 
distribution of authority, when taken into the sphere 
of the higher, the originating functions of government, 
is obviously a central constitutional question. If admin- 
istrative study can discover the best principles upon 
which to base such distribution, it will have done con- 
stitutional study an invaluable service. Montesquieu 
did not, I am convinced, say the last word on this head. 

To discover the best principle for the distribution of 
authority is of greater importance, possibly, under a 
democratic system, where officials serve many masters, 
than under others where they serve but a few. All 
sovereigns are suspicious of their servants, and the 
sovereign people is no exception to the rule; but how 
is its suspicion to be allayed by knowledge? If that 
suspicion could but be clarified into wise vigilance, it 
would be altogether salutary; if that vigilance could be 
aided by the unmistakable placing of responsibility, it 
would be altogether beneficent. Suspicion in itself is 
never healthful either in the private or in the public 
mind. Trust is strength in all relations of life; and, as 
it is the office of the constitutional reformer to create 
conditions of trustfulness, so it is the office of the ad- 
ministrative organizer to fit administration with con- 
ditions of clear-cut responsibility which shall insure 
trustworthiness. 

And let me say that large powers and unhampered 
discretion seem to me the indispensable conditions of 
responsibility. Public attention must be easily directed, 
in each case of good or bad administration, to just the 


COLLEGE AND STATE 149 


man deserving of praise or blame. There is no danger 
in power, if only it be not irresponsible. If it be 
divided, dealt out in shares to many, it is obscured; 
and if it be obscured, it is made irresponsible. But 
if it be centred in heads of the service and in heads of 
branches of the service, it is easily watched and brought 
to book. If to keep his office a man must achieve open 
and honest success, and if at the same time he feels him- 
self entrusted with large freedom of discretion, the 
greater his power the less likely is he to abuse it, the 
more is he nerved and sobered and elevated by it. ‘The 
less his power, the more safely obscure and unnoticed 
does he feel his position to be, and the more readily 
does he relapse into remissness. 

Just here we manifestly emerge upon the field of 
that still larger question,—the proper relations between 
public opinion and administration. 

To whom is official trustworthiness to be disclosed, 
and by whom is it to be rewarded? Is the official to 
look to the public for his meed of praise and his push 
of promotion, or only to his superior in office? Are 
the people to be called in to settle administrative dis- 
cipline as they are called in to settle constitutional 
principles? ‘These questions evidently find their root 
in what is undoubtedly the fundamental problem of 
this whole study. That problem is: What part shall 
public opinion take in the conduct of administration? 

The right answer seems to be, that public opinion 
shall play the part of authoritative critic. » 

But the method by which its authority shall be made 
to tell? Our peculiar American difficulty in organizing 
administration is not the danger of losing liberty, but 
the danger of not being able or willing to separate its 
essentials from its accidents. Our success is made 
doubtful by that besetting error of ours, the error of 
trying to do too much by vote. Self-government does 
not consist in having a hand in everything, any more 
than housekeeping consists necessarily in cooking din- 


150 COLLEGE AND STATE 


ner with one’s own hands. The cook must be trusted 
with a large discretion as to the management of the 
fires and the ovens. 

In those countries in which public opinion has yet to 
be instructed in its privileges, yet to be accustomed to 
having its own way, this question as to the province of 
public opinion is much more readily soluble than in 
this country, where public opinion is wide awake and 
quite intent upon having its own way anyhow. It is 
pathetic to see a whole book written by a German 
professor of political science for the purpose of saying 
to his countrymen, ‘‘Please try to have an opinion about 
national affairs”; but a public which is so modest may 
at least be expected to be very docile and acquiescent 
in learning what things it has not a right to think and 
speak about imperatively. It may be sluggish, but it 
will not be meddlesome. It will submit to be instructed 
before it tries to instruct. Its political education will 
come before its political activity. In trying to instruct 
our own public opinion, we are dealing with a pupil 
apt to think itself quite sufficiently instructed before- 
hand. 

The problem is to make public opinion efficient with- 
out suffering it to be meddlesome. Directly exercised, 
in the oversight of the daily details and in the choice 
of the daily means of government, public criticism is 
of course a clumsy nuisance, a rustic handling delicate 
machinery. But as superintending the greater forces 
of formative policy alike in politics and administration, 
public criticism is altogether safe and beneficent, alto- 
gether indispensable. Let administrative study find 
the best means for giving public criticism this control 
and for shutting it out from all other interference. 

But is the whole duty of administrative study done 
when it has taught the people what sort of administra- 
tion to desire and demand, and how to get what they 
demand? Ought it not to go on to drill candidates 
for the public service? 


COLLEGE AND STATE ISI 


There is an admirable movement towards universal 
political education now afoot in this country. The 
time will soon come when no college of respectability 
can afford to do without a well-filled chair of political 
science. But the education thus imparted will go but 
a certain length. It will multiply the number of intelli- 
gent critics of government, but it will create no com- 
petent body of administrators. It will prepare the way 
for the development of a sure-footed understanding 
of the general principles of government, but it will 
not necessarily foster skill in conducting government. 
Iz is an education which will equip legislators, perhaps, 
but not executive officials. If we are to improve public 
opinion, which is the motive power of government, we 
must prepare better officials as the apparatus of govern- 
ment. If we are to put in new boilers and to mend the 
fires which drive our governmental machinery, we must 
not leave the old wheels and joints and valves and bands 
to creak and buzz and clatter on as the best they may 
at bidding of the new force. We must put in new run- 
ning parts wherever there is the least lack of strength 
or adjustment. It will be necessary to organize de- 
mocracy by sending up to the competitive examinations 
for the civil service men definitely prepared for stand- 
ing liberal tests as to technical knowledge. A technic- 
ally schooled civil service will presently have become 
indispensable. 

I know that a corps of civil servants prepared by a 
special schooling and drilled, after appointment, into 
a perfected organization, with appropriate hierarchy 
and characteristic discipline, seems to a great many very 
thoughtful persons to contain elements which might 
combine to make an offensive official class,—a distinct, 
semi-corporate body with sympathies divorced from 
those of a progressive, free-spirited people, and with 
hearts narrowed to the meanness of a bigoted official- 
ism, Certainly such a class would be altogether hateful 
and harmful in the United States. Any measures cal- 


152 COLLEGE AND STATE 


culated to produce it would for us be measures of re- 
action and of folly. 

But to fear the creation of a domineering, illiberal 
officialism as a result of the studies I am here proposing 
is to miss altogether the principle upon which I wish 
most to insist. That principle is, that administration 
in the United States must be at all points sensitive to 
public opinion. A body of thoroughly trained officials 
serving during good behavior we must have in any 
case: that is a plain business necessity. But the appre- 
hension that such a body will be anything un-American 
clears away the moment it is asked, What is to con- 
stitute good behavior? For that question obviously 
carries its own answer on its face. Steady, hearty alle- 
giance to the policy of the government they serve will 
constitute good behavior. That policy will have no 
taint of officialism about it. It will not be the creation 
of permanent officials, but of statesmen whose respon- 
sibility to public opinion will be direct and inevitable. 
Bureaucracy can exist only where the whole service of 
the state is removed from the common political life of 
the people, its chiefs as well as its rank and file. Its 
motives, its objects, its policy, its standards, must be 
bureaucratic. It would be difficult to point out any 
examples of impudent exclusiveness and arbitrariness 
on the part of officials doing service under a chief of 
department who really served the people, as all our 
chiefs of departments must be made to do. It would 
be easy, on the other hand, to adduce other instances 
like that of the influence of Stein in Prussia, where the 
leadership of one statesman imbued with true public 
spirit transformed arrogant and perfunctory bureaus 
into public-spirited instruments of just government. 

The ideal for us is a civil service cultured and self- 
sufficient enough to act with sense and vigor, and yet 
so intimately connected with the popular thought, by 
means of elections and constant public counsel, as to 


COLLEGE AND STATE UGR 


find arbitrariness or class spirit quite out of the ques- 
tion. | 


(oul 


Having thus viewed in some sort the subject-matter 
and the objects of this study of administration, what 
are we to conclude as to the methods best suited to it 
—the points of view most advantageous for it? 

Government is so near us, as much a thing of our 
daily familiar handling, that we can with difficulty 
see the need of any philosophical study of it, or the 
exact point of such study, should it be undertaken. We 
have been on our feet too long to study now the art 
of walking. We are a practical people, made so apt, 
so adept in self-government by centuries of experi- 
mental drill that we are scarcely any longer capable of 
perceiving the awkwardness of the particular system 
we may be using, just because it is so easy for us to 
use any system. We do not study the art of govern- 
ing: we govern. But mere unschooled genius for affairs 
will not save us from sad blunders in administration. 
Though democrats by long inheritance and repeated 
choice, we are still rather crude democrats. Old as 
democracy is, its organization on a basis of modern 
ideas and conditions is still an unaccomplished work. 
The democratic state has yet to be equipped for carry- 
ing those enormous burdens of administration which 
the needs of this industrial and trading age are so fast 
accumulating. Without comparative studies in govern- 
ment we cannot rid ourselves of the misconception that 
administration stands upon an essentially different basis 
in a democratic state from that on which it stands in 
a non-democratic state. 

After such study we could grant democracy the sufh- 
cient honor of ultimately determining by debate all 
essential questions affecting the public weal, of basing 
all structures of policy upon the major will; but we 
would have found but one rule of good administration 


154 COLLEGE AND STATE 


for all governments alike. So far as administrative 
functions are concerned, all governments have a strong 
structural likeness; more than that, if they are to be 
uniformly useful and efficient, they must have a strong 
structural likeness. A free man has the same bodily 
organs, the same executive parts, as the slave, however 
different may be his motives, his services, his energies. 
Monarchies and democracies, radically different as 
they are in other respects, have in reality much the 
same business to look to. 

It is abundantly safe nowadays to insist upon this 
actual likeness of all governments, because these are 
days when abuses of power are easily exposed and 
arrested, in countries like our own, by a bold, alert, 
inquisitive, detective public thought and a sturdy popu- 
lar self-dependence such as never existed before. We 
are slow to appreciate this; but it is easy to appreciate 
it. ‘ry to imagine personal government in the United 
States. It is like trying to imagine a national worship 
of Zeus. Our imaginations are too modern for the 
feat. 

But, besides being safe, it is necessary to see that for 
all governments alike the legitimate ends of adminis- 
tration are the same, in order not to be frightened at 
the idea of looking into foreign systems of administra- 
tion for instruction and suggestion; in order to get rid 
of the apprehension that we might perchance blindly 
borrow something incompatible with our principles. 
That man is blindly astray who denounces attempts to 
transplant foreign systems into this country. It is 
impossible: they simply would not grow here. But 
why should we not use such parts of foreign contriv- 
ances as we want, if they be in any way serviceable? 
We are in no danger of using them in a foreign way. 
We borrowed rice, but we do not eat it with chopsticks. 
We borrowed our whole political language from Eng- 
land, but we leave the words “king” and “‘lords’’ out 
of it. What did we ever originate, except the action 


COLLEGE AND STATE 155 


of the federal government upon individuals and some 
of the functions of the federal supreme court? 

We can borrow the science of administration with 
safety and profit if only we read all fundamental dif- 
ferences of condition into its essential tenets. We have 
only to filter it through our constitutions, only to put 
it over a slow fire of criticism and distill away its for- 
elgn gases. 

I know that there is a sneaking fear in some con- 
scientiously patriotic minds that studies of European 
systems might signalize some foreign methods as better 
than some American methods; and the fear is easily to 
be understood. But it would scarcely be avowed in just 
any company. 

It is the more necessary to insist upon thus putting 
away all prejudices against looking anywhere in the 
world but at home for suggestions in this study, because 
nowhere else in the whole field of politics, it would 
seem, can we make use of the historical, comparative 
method more safely than in this province of adminis- 
tration. Perhaps the more novel the forms we study 
the better. We shall the sooner learn the peculiarities 
of our own methods. We can never learn either our 
own weaknesses or our own virtues by comparing our- 
selves and ourselves. We are too used to the appear- 
ance and procedure of our own system to see its true 
significance. Perhaps even the English system is too 
much like our own to be used to the most profit in illus- 
tration. It is best on the whole to get entirely away 
from our own atmosphere and to be most careful in 
examining such systems as those of France and Ger- 
many. Seeing our own institutions through such media, 
we see ourselves as foreigners might see us were they 
to look at us without preconceptions. Of ourselves, so 
long as we know only ourselves, we know nothing. 

Let it be noted that it is the distinction, already 
drawn, between administration and politics which makes 
the comparative method so safe in the field of adminis- 


156 COLLEGE AND STATE 


tration. When we study the administrative systems of 
France and Germany, knowing that we are not in 
search of political principles, we need not care a pep- 
percorn for the constitutional or political reasons which 
Frenchmen or Germans give for their practices when 
explaining them to us. If I see a murderous fellow 
sharpening a knife cleverly, I can borrow his way of 
sharpening the knife without borrowing his probable 
intention to commit murder with it; and so, if I see a 
monarchist dyed in the wool managing a public bureau 
well, I can learn his business methods without chang- 
ing one of my republican spots. He may serve his 
king; I will continue to serve the people; but I should 
like to serve my sovereign as well as he serves his. By 
keeping this distinction in view,—that is, by studying 
administration as a means of putting our own politics 
into convenient practice, as a means of making what is 
democratically politic towards all administratively pos- 
sible towards each,—we are on perfectly safe ground, 
and can learn without error what foreign systems have 
to teach us. We thus devise an adjusting weight for our 
comparative method of study. We can thus scrutinize 
the anatomy of foreign governments without fear of 
getting any of their diseases into our veins; dissect alien 
systems without apprehension of blood-poisoning. 
Our own politics must be the touchstone for all 
theories. The principles on which to base a science of 
administration for America must be principles which 
have democratic policy very much at heart. And, to 
suit American habit, all general theories must, as theo- 
ries, keep modestly in the background, not in open argu- 
ment only, but even in our own minds,—lest opinions 
satisfactory only to the standards of the library should 
be dogmatically used, as if they must be quite as satis- 
factory to the standards of practical politics as well. 
Doctrinaire devices must be postponed to tested prac- 
tices. Arrangements not only sanctioned by conclusive 
experience elsewhere but also congenial to American 


COLLEGE AND STATE 157 


habit must be preferred without hesitation to theoretical 
perfection. In a word, steady, practical statesmanship 
must come first, closet doctrine second. The cosmo- 
politan what-to-do must always be commanded by the 
American how-to-do-it. 

Our duty is, to supply the best possible life to a 
federal organization, to systems within systems; to make 
town, city, county, state, and federal governments live 
with a like strength and an equally assured healthful- 
ness, keeping each unquestionably its own master and 
yet making all interdependent and codperative, com- 
bining independence with mutual helpfulness. The task 
is great and important enough to attract the best minds. 

This interlacing of local self-government with federal 
self-government is quite a modern conception. It is not 
like the arrangements of imperial federation in Ger- 
many. ‘There local government is not yet, fully, local 
self-government. [he bureaucrat is everywhere busy. 
His efficiency springs out of esprit de corps, out of care 
to make ingratiating obeisance to the authority of a 
superior, or, at best, out of the soil of a sensitive con- 
science. He serves, not the public, but an irresponsible 
minister. The question for us is, how shall our series 
of governments within governments be so administered 
that it shall always be to the interest of the public officer 
to serve, not his superior alone but the community also, 
with the best efforts of his talents and the soberest serv- 
ice of his conscience? How shall such service be made 
to his commonest interest by contributing abundantly to 
his sustenance, to his dearest interest by furthering his 
ambition, and to his highest interest by advancing his 
honor and establishing his character? And how shall 
this be done alike for the local part and for the national 
whole? 

If we solve this problem we shall again pilot the 
world. There is a tepadency—is there not ?—a tendency 
as yet dim, but already steadily impulsive and clearly 
destined to prevail, towards, first the confederation of 


pe OO AAS 


158 COLLEGE AND STATE 


parts of empires like the British, and finally of great 
states themselves. Instead of centralization of power, 
there is to be wide union with tolerated divisions of pre- 
rogative. This is a tendency towards the American 
type—of governments joined with governments for the 
pursuit of common purposes, in honorary equality and 
honorable subordination. Like principles of civil lib- 
erty are everywhere fostering like methods of govern- 
ment; and if comparative studies of the ways and means 
of government should enable us to offer suggestions 
which will practicably combine openness and vigor in 
the administration of such governments with ready 
docility to all serious, well-sustained public criticism, 
they will have approved themselves worthy to be ranked 
among the highest and most fruitful of the great depart- 
ments of political study. That they will issue in such 
suggestions I confidently hope. 


BRYCE’S “AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH” 


A REVIEW OF JAMES BRYCE’S “THE AMERICAN COM- 
MONWEALTH”’ IN THE ‘POLITICAL SCIENCE QUAR- 
TERLY,’ MARCH, 1889, VOL. IV, PP. 153-169. WRIT- 
TEN WHILE MR. WILSON WAS TEACHING AT 
WESLEYAN COLLEGE. 


| easy is a great work, worthy of heartiest praise. 
Its strength does not lie in its style, although that, 
while lacking distinction, is eminently straightforward 
and clear; nor yet altogether in its broad scope of 
weighty topics,—a scope wide almost beyond precedent 
in such subjects, and rich in suggestion,—but chiefly in 
its method and in its point of view. Mr. Bryce does 
not treat the institutions of the United States as experi- 
ments in the application of theory, but as quite normal 
historical phenomena to be looked at, whether for 
purposes of criticism or merely for purposes of descrip- 
tion, in the practical, every-day light of comparative 
politics. He seeks to put American institutions in their 
only instructive setting—that, namely, of comparative 
institutional history and life. 

It is of course inevitable to compare and contrast 
what Mr. Bryce has given us in these admirable volumes 
with de Tocqueville’s great Democracy in America. 
The relations which the two works bear the one to the 
other are almost altogether relations of contrast, and 
the contrast serves to make conspicuous the peculiar 
significance of what Mr. Bryce has written. De Tocque- 
ville came to America to observe the operation of a 
principle of government, to seek a well-founded answer 
to the question: How does democracy work? Mr. 
Bryce, on the other hand, came, and came not once but 

159 


160 COLLEGE AND STATE 


several times, to observe the concrete phenomena of 
an institutional development, into which, as he early per- 
ceived, abstract political theory can scarcely be said to 
have entered as a formative force. The question for 
which he sought an answer was this: What sort of in- 
stitutions have the English developed in America? In 
satisfaction of his curiosity, his keen and elevated 
philosophical desire, de Tocqueville saw the crude and 
impatient democracy of Andrew Jackson’s time. Mr. 
Bryce has seen the almost full grown, the measurably 
sobered America of to-day, and has seen, therefore, with 
a fairer chance of just proportion. 

It will hardly be accounted a disparagement of Mr. 
Bryce’s style to say that it is inferior to de Tocque- 
ville’s; the thoughts it has to convey, the meanings it 
has to suggest belong to quite another class than that to 
which de Tocqueville’s judgments must be assigned: it 
is not meant to carry the illumination of philosophical 
conceptions into the regions of fact which it explores; 
its task is rather exposition than judgment. Mr. Bryce 
does not feel called upon to compete with de Tocque- 
ville in the field in which de Tocqueville is possibly be- 
yond rivalry. Something very different was needed, and 
that he has done to admiration: he has written a book 
invaluable to students of comparative politics,—in- 
valuable because of its fullness, its accuracy, its candor, 
its sane, perhaps I ought rather to say its sage, balance 
of practical judgment. 

Mr. Bryce’s qualifications for the great task he has 
thus worthily performed were probably equal to those 
of any other man of our generation. First of all, he 
is a Roman lawyer steeped in the legal and political con- 
ceptions of that race whose originative strength in the 
field of law and practical sagacity in the field of politics 
were as conspicuous and as potent in the ancient world 
as the legal capacity and political virility of the Eng- 
lish race are in the modern world. His knowledge of 
Roman institutions constantly serves to remind him of 


COLLEGE AND STATE 161 


the oldness and persistency of certain features of insti- 
tutional development, to warn him against perceiving 
novelty where it does not exist. In the second place, 
he is a member of Parliament and an English constitu- 
tional statesman, knowing the parent stock from which 
our institutions sprang, not only through study, but 
also through having himself tasted of its present fruits. 
Perhaps no one can so readily understand our institu- 
tions as an English public man sufficiently read in our 
history and our constitutional law not to expect to find 
bishops in our Senate or prime ministers in the presi- 
dency. He has breathed the air of practical politics 
in the country from which we get our habits of political 
action; and he is so familiar with the machinery of gov- 
ernment at home as to be able to perceive at once the 
most characteristic differences, as well as the real re- 
semblances, between political arrangements in England 
and in the United States. He is prepared to see clearly, 
almost instinctively, the derivation of our institutions, 
at the same time that he is sure to be struck by even 
our minor divergences from English practice. But 
Mr. Bryce brought to the task of judging us a wider 
and more adequate preparation than even a schooling 
in Roman law and English practice could by itself 
have supplied. He is sufficiently acquainted with the 
history and practical operation of the present constitu- 
tions of the leading states of Europe to be able readily 
to discern what, in American practice, is peculiar to 
America, or to America and England, what common 
to modern political experience the world over. In brief, 
he has a comprehensive mastery of the materials of com- 
parative politics, and great practical sagacity in inter- 
preting them. 

Mr. Bryce divides his work into six parts. In Part I 
he discusses ‘“‘The National Government,” going care- 
fully over the ground made almost tediously familiar 
to American constitutional students by commentaries 
without number. But he gives to his treatment a fresh- 


162 COLLEGE AND STATE 


ness of touch and a comprehensiveness which impart to 
it a new and first-rate interest. This he does by com- 
bining in a single view both the legal theory and inter- 
pretation and the practical aspects and operation of the 
federal machinery. More than that, he brings that 
machinery and the whole federal arrangement into 
constant comparison with federal experiments and con- 
stitutional machinery elsewhere. ‘There is a scope and 
an outlook here such as render his critical expositions 
throughout both impressive and stimulating. Congress, 
the presidency, and the federal courts are discussed in 
every point of view that can yield instruction. The 
forms and principles of the federal system are explained 
both historically and practically and are estimated with 
dispassionate candor. Perhaps the most emphasized 
point made in this part is one which is derived from 
comparative politics. It is the separation of the execu- 
tive from Congress, a separation which deprives the 
executive of all voice in the formation of administrative 
and financial policy, and which deprives Congress of 
such leadership as would give its plans coherency and 
make available for its use that special and intimate 
knowledge of administrative possibilities without which 
much well-meant legislation must utterly miscarry. This 
is of course the particular in which our government 
differs most conspicuously from all the other govern- 
ments of the world. Everywhere else there is one 
form or another of ministerial leadership in the legis- 
lature. A body of ministers constitutes, as it were, a 
nerve centre, or rather a sensitive presiding brain, in 
the body politic, taking from the nation such broad sug- 
gestions as public opinion can unmistakably convey 
touching the main ends to be sought by legislation and 
policy, but themselves suggesting in turn, in the light 
of their own special knowledge and intimate experience 
of affairs, the best means by which those ends may be 
attained. Because we are without such legislative lead- 
ership we remain for long periods of embarrassment 


COLLEGE AND STATE 163 


without any solution of some of the simplest problems 
that await legislation. To this absence of cabinet gov- 
ernment in America, and the consequent absence of 
party government in the European sense of the term, 
Mr. Bryce again and again returns as to a salient fea- 
ture, full of significance both for much evil and for 
some good.? The evil consists in slipshod, haphazard, 
unskilled and hasty legislation; the good, so far as it 
may be stated in a single sentence, consists in delaying 
the triumphs of public opinion and thereby, perhaps, 
rendering them safer triumphs. 

One chapter of this first part possesses conspicuous 
merit, namely, chapter xxiil, on ““The Courts and the 
Constitution.” 3 It brings out with admirable clear- 
ness the wholly normal character of the function of 
constitutional interpretation, as a function familiar 
from of old to English judicial practice in the mainte- 
nance of charter provisions, and of course necessary, 
according to English precedents and ideas, to the main- 
tenance and application of charter-like written constitu- 
tions. In exposition of this view, now universally held 
but not always lucidly explained, he gives a prominence 
such as it has never before had to the very instructive 
fact that the constitution does not grant the power of 
constitutional interpretation to the federal courts in 
explicit terms, but that that power, so marvelled at by 
Europeans, is simply a necessary inference (at least a 
necessary English inference) from its general provisions 
touching the functions of a federal judiciary. One 
point touching the action of the courts is, however, 
left perhaps a little too much to this same English infer- 
ence. It is stated that cases involving questions of 
constitutionality must wait to be made up in the ordi- 
nary manner at the initiative of private parties suing 
in their own interest and are often, most often, decided 

*See especially vol. ii, pp. 316, 317. 
* See particularly vol. i, chap. xxv: Comparison of the American and 


European Systems. 
* Vol. i, pp. 237-255. 


164 COLLEGE AND STATE 


at the instance and in behalf of such private litigants; 
but it is left too much to inference—an inference easy 
of course to an American, but doubtless far from ob- 
vious to a foreigner—that a decision, when against the 
constitutionality of a law, is, not that the law is null 
and void, but is that the law will not be enforced in that 
case. Therefore other cases involving the same points 
will not be made up, litigants knowing what to expect, 
and it is thus, indirectly, that the desired annulment is 
effected. This is not a matter of form merely or only 
of curious interest. For Mr. Bryce’s purpose it is a 
point of importance. It illustrates the thesis he is try- 
ing to establish, namely, the normality of the whole 
principle and procedure: the entire absence from our 
system of any idea of a veto exercised by the courts 
upon legislation or of any element of direct antagonism 
between Congress and the judiciary, and the matter-of- 
course interpretation of the supreme law by those who 
interpret all law. 

The appendix to Volume I adds to this first part, be- 
sides much other illustrative matter, a statement of the 
main features of the federal structure of the two great 
English universities and the federal constitution of 
Canada. 

Part II is devoted to ‘“The State Governments.” 
Here for the first time in any comprehensive treatise 
the states are given the prominence and the careful 
examination which they have always deserved at the 
hands of students of our institutions but have never be- 
fore gotten. Under some seventeen heads, occupying 
as many close-packed chapters full of matter, the state 
governments (including of course local government 
and the virtually distinct subject of the government of 
cities), state politics, the territories, and the general 
topics in comparative politics suggested by state con- 
stitutions and state practice are discussed, so far as re- 
liable materials serve, with the same interest and thor- 
oughness that were in the first part bestowed upon 


COLLEGE AND STATE 165 


the federal government. Mr. Bryce more than once 
urges upon European students of comparative politics 
the almost incomparable richness of this well-nigh unex- 
plored region of state law. If he can wonder that Mr. 
Mill “in his Representative Government scarcely refers 
to”’ our states, and that ‘‘Mr. Freeman in his learned 
essays, Sir H. Maine in his ingenious book on Popular 
Government, pass by phenomena which would have ad- 
mirably illustrated some of their reasonings,’’ finding, 
as he does, in M. Boutmy and Dr. von Holst the only 
European discoverers in this field, it may profit Amer- 
ican students to reflect in what light their own hitherto 
almost complete neglect of the constitutional history 
of the states ought to be viewed. This second part of 
Mr. Bryce’s book ought to mark a turning point in our 
constitutional and political studies. In several of our 
greater universities some attention is already paid to 
state law and history; but it is safe to say that in no 
one of them are these subjects given the prominence they 
deserve; and it is safe to predict that our state history 
will some day be acknowledged a chief source of in- 
struction touching the development of modern institu- 
tions. The states have been laboratories in which Eng- 
lish habits, English law, English political principles 
have been put to the most varied, and sometimes to the 
most curious, tests; and it is by the variations of institu- 
tions under differing circumstances that the nature and 
laws of institutional growth are to be learned. While 
European nations have been timidly looking askance 
at the various puzzling problems now pressing alike in 
the field of economics and in the field of politics, our 
states have been trying experiments with a boldness 
and a persistency which, if generated by ignorance in 
many cases and in many fraught with disaster, have 
at any rate been surpassingly rich in instruction. 

Part III, on ‘“The Party System,” is the crowning 
achievement of the author’s method. Here in a learned 
systematic treatise which will certainly for a long time 


166 COLLEGE AND STATE 


be a standard authority on our institutions, a much used 
handbook for the most serious students of politics, we 
have a careful, dispassionate, scientific description of the 
‘‘machine,’’ an accurately drawn picture of “‘bosses,” a 
clear exposition of the way in which the machine works, 
an analysis of all the most practical methods of ‘‘practi- 
cal politics,” as well as what we should have expected, 
namely, a sketch of party history, an explanation of 
the main characteristics of the parties of to-day, a dis- 
cussion of the conditions of public life in the United 
States, those conditions which help to keep the best men 
out of politics and produce certain distinctively Ameri- 
can types of politicians, and a complete study of the 
nominating convention. One can well believe that that 
not supersensitive person, the practical politician, much 
as he pretends to scorn the indignant attacks made upon 
him by ‘‘pious” reformers, would be betrayed into open 
emotion should he read this exact and passionless, this 
discriminating and scientific digest of the methods by 
which he lives, of the motives by which he is moved. 
And certainly those who are farthest removed from 
the practical politician’s point of view will gain from 
these chapters a new and vital conception of what it is 
to study constitutions in the life. “The wholesome light 
of Mr. Bryce’s method shines with equal ray alike upon 
the just and upon the unjust. 

Mr. Bryce very happily describes our system of nom- 
ination by convention as 


an effort of nature to fill the void left in America by the absence 
of the European parliamentary or cabinet system, under which an 
executive is called into being out of the legislature by the majority 
of the legislature. In the European system no single act of nomina- 
tion is necessary, because the leader of the majority comes gradually 
to the top in virtue of his own strength. 


But what, in view of this, are we to say of his 
judgment ? that ‘‘a system for selecting candidates is not 


* Vol. ii, p. 187. 
* Ibid., p. 47. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 167 


a mere contrivance for preventing party dissensions, 
but an essential feature of matured democracy’’? 
Clearly no system for nominating candidates can touch 
the leading places in a democracy, however matured 
that democracy may be, if those places be filled under 
the parliamentary or cabinet system, as they are in 
England and France. Mr. Bryce is able to show that 
the selection of candidates by local representative party 
associations has been coming more and more into vogue 
in England pari passu with the widening of the fran- 
chise, having in 1885 been behind almost every new 
Liberal candidate for the Commons; but is it quite 
safe to argue cum hoc ergo propter hoc? Of course 
it needs no nominating convention in Midlothian to 
select Mr. Gladstone, and no caucus in any other con- 
stituency to choose for the voters a man who has made 
himself necessary because of mastery in Parliament, be- 
cause of proof given there of a dominant mind in states- 
manship. But, leaving parliamentary leaders apart, is 
not all nominating machinery a “separable accident”’ 
rather than an essential feature of democracy? Has 
it failed of construction in Switzerland merely because 
of the smallness of the Swiss constituencies? Have 
not the exceeding multiplicity of elective officers and that 
pernicious principle that no one may be chosen state or 
national representative except from the district in which 
he lives—a principle whose history runs back to in- 
significant Governor Phips of colonial Massachusetts— 
been more to blame than anything that can be regarded 
as essential to democracy? ? Above all, is not that com- 
plete obscuration of individual responsibility which re- 
sults from the operation of the “checks and balances’”’ 


*Vol. ii, p. 48, note. 

?Mr. Wilson discussed this subject toward the close of his Presidency 
and then maintained that the greatest weakness of the American system 
is the habit of requiring representatives to be residents of particular 
districts. He said that it is not a constitutional requirement but a habit, 
and a habit which weakens and lowers the character of the representa- 
tive. (Conversation of December 27, 1920.—William E. Dodd.) 


168 COLLEGE AND STATE 


of our system chiefly chargeable? It prevents any man 
from selecting himself for leadership by conspicuous 
service and makes the active part of politics turn upon 
selecting men rather than upon selecting measures. Men 
are not identified with measures; there must, conse- 
quently, be some artificial way of picking them out. 

In enumerating the causes why the best men do not 
enter politics; Mr. Bryce seems to me to omit one of 
the most important, although he elsewhere repeatedly 
gives evidence that he is in full view of it, namely, the 
absence of all great prizes of legislative leadership to 
be won by sheer strength of persuasive mind and con- 
structive skill. He sums up the reasons he does give 
with admirable point, however, by saying that ‘“‘in Amer- 
ica, while politics are relatively less interesting than 
in Europe, and lead to less, other careers are relatively 
more interesting and lead to more’’;? but he omits to 
state, in this connection, one of the most patent reasons 
why politics are relatively less interesting, why they 
lead to less, here than elsewhere.? 

Part IV, on ‘“‘Public Opinion,” its American organs, 
its American characteristics, its American successes and 
failures, contains some of the author’s best analytical 
work, but is less characteristic of his method than the 
preceding parts. 

Part V contains ‘Illustrations and Reflections.” It 
opens with an excellent chapter on the Tweed ring by 
one of the most lucid of our own writers, Professor 
Goodnow; treats of other special phases of local ring 
government; of ‘“‘Kearneyism in California,” of laissez 

* Vol. ii, chap. Iviii, pp. 37-43. 

*Ibid., p. 41. 

*For Mr. Bryce’s recognition of the readiness of the people to receive 
and follow leaders whenever circumstances produce them, spite of 
institutions—an acknowledgment apparently not perfectly consistent with 
some other judgments of the book (e.g., that any arrogation of a right to 


consideration, greater than that accorded to the ordinary, the average 
man, is resented)-—sce vol. ii, pp. 333, 334- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 169 


faire, of woman’s suffrage, and of the supposed and 
true faults of democracy as it appears in America. 

Part VI concerns ‘‘Social Institutions’’—railroads, 
Wall Street, the bench, the bar, the universities, the 
influence of religion, the position of women, the influ- 
ence of democracy on thought and on creative intel- 
lectual power, American oratory, etc.,—and contains 
the author’s cautious forecast of the political, social, 
and economic future of the United States. 

All through, the work is pervaded with the air of 
practical sense, the air of having been written by an 
experienced man of affairs, accustomed to handle insti- 
tutions as well as to observe them. Besides, this ob- 
server is an Englishman without English insularity, 
with views given elasticity by wide studies of institu- 
tions and extensive travel. He understands us with 
the facility of one who belongs to the same race; but 
he understands us also in our relations with the politics 
of the wider world of Europe. 

The work, however, has the faults of its good quali- 
ties. If it is full of acute and sage observation and 
satisfying in its wonderfully complete practical analy- 
sis, it gains its advantage at a certain sacrifice. The 
movement of the treatment is irregular, and even hesi- 
tating at times, like the varied conversation of a full, 
reiterative talker; and the internal plan of each part 
is lacking in executive directness and consistency, is 
even sometimes a little confused, reminding one now 
and again of the political system the author is describ- 
ing. So judicious and balanced is the tone, too, that it 
is also a little colorless. It is a matter-of-fact book in 
which, because of the prominence and multiplicity of 
the details, it is often difficult to discern the large pro- 
portions of the thought. It is full of thoughts, thoughts 
singularly purged of prejudice, notably rich in sugges- 
tion; but these thoughts do not converge towards any 
common conceptions. It is rather, one may imagine, like 
that lost book of Aristotle’s which contained his mate- 


170 COLLEGE AND STATE 


rials of observation than like the Politics. It carries 
one over immense distances characteristic of its great 
subject; but this it does by carrying one in many direc- 
tions, in order to do which, from substantially the same 
point of departure in each case, it repeatedly traverses 
the same ground. In brief, it is an invaluable store- 
house of observations in comparative politics rather 
than of guiding principles of government inductively 
obtained. The facts, not the principles derivable from 
them, are prominent. 

These underlying principles could not, indeed, have 
been made prominent without a much freer use, a much 
fuller use, of the historical method than Mr. Bryce 
has allowed himself; and it is in his sparing use of 
history that Mr. Bryce seems to me principally at 
fault. The other drawbacks to his treatment which 
I have mentioned are, no doubt, for the most part 
directly due to his purpose, clearly and consistently kept 
in view, to explore this rich field of politics in search 
of the facts only, not in search of generalizations. His 
method is that of thorough, exact, exhaustive analysis. 
But history belongs to the very essence of such a method; 
facts in comparative politics possess little value in the 
absence of clues to their development; and one cannot 
but wonder at the apologies which preface Mr. Bryce’s 
occasional introduction of historical matter. Without 
more history than he gives there must be at least a par- 
tial failure to meet the demands of his own method. 
His work satisfies all who are in search of informa- 
tion, whether as to the existing facts or as to the formal 
historical derivation of our institutions. But its his- 
torical portions do not go beyond the formal history 
of measures and of methods to make evident the forces 
of national development and material circumstances 
which have lain behind measures and methods, and 
which, when once the nation gets past the youth of its 
continent, must work deep modification in its institu- 
tions and in its practical politics. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 171 


I can best illustrate what I mean by taking as points 
of departure Mr. Bryce’s own clear statements of the 
views with which he approached our institutions. 
‘“‘America,” he says, “‘is made all of a piece; its institu- 
~ tions are the product of its economic and social con- 
ditions and the expression of its character.’”’1 More 
pointedly and forcibly still does he express the same 
thing at page 404 of the same volume, in his chapter 
on laissez faire. He there reports himself as having 
said, to an English friend who bade him devote a chap- 
ter to the American theory of the state, ‘‘that the Amer- 
icans had no theory of the state, and felt no need for 
one, being content, like the English, to base their con- 
stitutional ideas upon law and history.” ‘“‘No one 
doubts,” he says, in another place, “that fifty years 
hence it (America) will differ at least as much from 
what it is now, as it differs now from the America which 
de Tocqueville described;” ? and this difference, he is 
evidently ready to believe, may very possibly be a dif- 
ference of institutions as well as a difference in mate- 
rial and social condition. Once again, in the chapters 
in which he discusses the influence of democracy on 
thought and on creative intellectual power, Mr. Bryce 
insists, assuredly with perfect justice, that political insti- 
tutions have comparatively little to do with intellectual 
product and quality, certainly in the case of the United 
States. There is really, when American institutions are 
compared with English, nothing essentially novel in our 
political arrangements: they are simply the normal 
institutions of the Englishman in America. ‘They are, 
in other words, English institutions as modified by the 
conditions surrounding settlements effected under cor- 
porate charters, in separate but neighbor colonies; above 
all as dominated by the material, economic, and social 
conditions attending the advance of the race in Amer- 
ica. ‘These conditions it is, not political principles, that 


* Vol. ii, p. 473. 
*Tbid., p. 691. 


172 COLLEGE AND STATE 


have controlled our intellectual as well as our political 
development. Mr. Bryce has frequently to say of prop- 
ositions of de Tocqueville’s that, although possibly or 
even probably true when advanced, they are now no 
longer true; for example, certain “supposed faults of 
democracy.” Many things supposed to be due to 
democracy, to political ideas, have turned out, under the 
test of time, to be due to circumstances. So discon- 
nected with institutions, indeed, are actual national 
methods and characteristics that even what Mr. Bryce 
says of American public opinion in his very suggestive 
and valuable fourth part will doubtless be true only 
so long as our country is new. Americans, he says, 
are sympathetic, but they are unsettled and changeful. 
This cannot remain true of the people of an old and 
fully settled country, where sympathy will lead to co- 
hesiveness and to the development of local types of 
opinion, where variety, consequently, will take the place 
of that uniformity of life and opinion which now leads 
to a too rapid transmission of impressions and im- 
pulses throughout the whole body of the nation,—the 
quick contagion of even transient impressions and emo- 
tions. America is now sauntering through her resources 
and through the mazes of her politics with easy non- 
chalance; but presently there will come a time when she 
will be surprised to find herself grown old,—a country 
crowded, strained, perplexed,—when she will be obliged 
to fall back upon her conservatism, obliged to pull 
herself together, adopt a new regimen of life, husband 
her resources, concentrate her strength, steady her 
methods, sober her views, restrict her vagaries, trust 
her best, not her average, members. ‘That will be the 
time of change. 

All this Mr. Bryce sees; his conspicuous merit con- 
sists, indeed, in perceiving that democracy is not a cause 
but an effect, in seeing that our politics are no ex- 
planation of our character, but that our character, 
rather, is the explanation of our politics. ‘Throughout 


COLLEGE AND STATE 173 


his work you feel that he is generally conscious of the 
operation of historical causes and always guided by a 
quick appreciation of the degree to which circumstances 
enter into our institutions to mould and modify them. 
A reader who is himself conscious of our historical 
make-up and tendencies can see that Mr. Bryce is also. 
But it is one thing for a writer to be conscious of such 
things himself and quite another thing for him to con- 
vey to readers not possessed of his knowledge adequate 
conceptions of historical development. If our politics 
are the expression of our character and if that character 
is the result of the operation of forces permanent in 
the history of the English race, modified in our case by 
peculiar influences, subtle or obvious, operative in our 
separate experience, the influences, namely, of a peculiar 
legal status and of unexampled physical surroundings, 
then it is to the explanation of these forces and influ- 
ences that every means of exposition ought to be bent 
in order to discover the bases of our law and our con- 
stitutions, of our constructive statesmanship and our 
practical politics. A description of our institutions, 
even though it be so full and accurate as to call for little 
of either criticism or addition, like this of Mr. Bryce’s, 
will not suffice unless backed by something that goes 
deeper than mere legal or phenomenal history. In legal 
history Mr. Bryce leaves little to be desired: nothing 
could be more satisfying than his natural history of our 
courts with their powers of constitutional interpreta- 
tion. The course of constitutional amendment, too, he 
traces, and all such concrete phenomena as the growth 
and operation of nominating conventions, the genesis and 
expansion of the spoils system, or of municipal rings 
and ‘“‘bossdom,” efc. But outside of legal and phe- 
nomenal history he seldom essays to go. If his method 
were that which de Tocqueville too often followed, 
there would be little reason why he should look further 
than visible institutions; if a nation can be understood 
by the single light of its institutions, its institutions may 


174 COLLEGE AND STATE 


be made to stand forth as itself. But if institutions be 
the expression of the national life, as Mr. Bryce rightly 
conceives, that national life must be brought constantly 
forward, even in its most hidden aspects, to explain 
them. 

Some passages of Mr. Bryce’s work, indeed, afford 
ground for suspecting that he does not himself always 
make sufficient private analysis even of the forces op- 
erative outside of our laws and acting in support and 
vivification of them. Thus he permits himself the old 
expression that we are “trying an experiment” in gov- 
ernment. ‘This is not true except in the same sense that 
it is true that the English are trying an experiment in 
their extensions of the franchise and in their extreme 
development of ministerial responsibility to the Com- 
mons. We are in fact but living an old life under 
new conditions. Where there is conservative continuity 
there can hardly be said to be experiment. Again, 
Mr. Bryce’s statement,—the old statement,—that 1789 
witnessed the birth of a national government could be 
made only by one who had not analyzed the growth of 
the national idea, which is coincident with the conscious 
development of the national experience and life. Its 
truth in juristic theory may be cogently maintained; 
but from the lay historian’s point of view, and par- 
ticularly from the point of view proper to English in- 
stitutional and legal history, it is scarcely true at all. 
In the first place, no people can be a nation before its 
time, and its time has not come until the national thought 
and feeling have been developed and have become preva- 
lent. Until a people thinks its government national it 
is not national. In the second place, the whole history 
—indeed the very theory—of judge-made law such as 
ours, whether it be equity or common law, bears wit- 
ness to the fact that for a body of English people the 
fundamental principles of the law are at any given time 
substantially what they are then thought to be. The 
saving fact is that English (and American) thought 


COLLEGE AND STATE 175 


is, particularly in the sphere of law, cautiously con- 
servative, coherently continuous, not carelessly or irre- 
sponsibly spreading abroad, but slowly ‘broadening 
down from precedent to precedent” within a well- 
defined course. It is not a flood, but a river. The com- 
plete nationality of our law, therefore, had to await 
the slowly developed nationality of our thought and 
habit. To leave out in any account of our develop- 
ment the growth of the national idea and habit, conse- 
quently, is to omit the best possible example of one of 
the most instructive facts of our politics, the develop- 
ment, namely, of constitutional principles outside the 
Constitution, the thoroughly English accumulation of 
unwritten law. ‘That there has been such an accumula- 
tion Mr. Bryce of course points out and illustrates; but 
because of his shyness touching the use of history, which 
he fears will be tedious or uninteresting, he leaves the 
matter, after all, without adequate analysis. For such 
an analysis is not supplied by his chapter (xxxiv) on 
“The Development of the Constitution by Usage.” 
That chapter contains a history of measures, of certain 
concrete practices, but no account of the national senti- 
ment which has so steadily grown into a controlling, 
disposing, governing force, and which has really be- 
come a most tremendous sort of “usage.” It is a 
sketch of the development of the government rather 
than of the influences which have made the government 
and altered the conceptions upon which it rests. 

This must be taken to explain also the author’s some- 
what inadequate view of the constitutional effects of 
the war of secession. He seems to judge the effects 
of the war by the contents of the thirteenth, fourteenth, 
and fifteenth amendments.1. A European reader, I be- 
lieve, would get the impression that our civil war, which 
was a final contest between nationalism and sectional- 
ism, simply confirmed the Union in its old strength, 


*Thus he expresses surprise at the slightness of the changes wrought 
by the war in the Constitution—meaning, of course, the formal changes. 
£ £ 


176 COLLEGE AND STATE 


whereas it in reality, of course, confirmed it in a new 
character and strength which it had not at first pos- 
sessed, but which the steady advance of the national de- 
velopment, and of the national idea thereby begotten, 
had in effect at length bestowed upon it. 

If Mr. Bryce was obliged to exclude such historical 
analysis from his volumes, whose whole spirit and 
method nevertheless suggest such an analysis, and seem 
to await it, if not to take it for granted, why then much 
remains to be done in elucidation of the lessons of 
government to be learned in America. ‘Those lessons 
can be fully learned only from history. ‘There still re- 
mains to be accomplished the work of explaining de- 
mocracy by America, in supplement of Mr. Bryce’s ad- 
mirable explanation of democracy in America. Com- 
parative politics must yet be made to yield an answer 
to the broad and all-important question: What is de- 
mocracy that it should be possible, nay natural, to some 
nations, impossible as yet to others? Why has it been 
a cordial and a tonic to little Switzerland and to big 
America, while it has been as yet only a quick intoxicant 
or a slow poison to France and Spain, a mere madden- 
ing draught to the South American states? Why has 
England approached democratic institutions by slow and 
steady stages of deliberate and peaceful development, 
while so many other states have panted towards democ- 
racy through constant revolution? Why has democ- 
racy existed in America and in Australia virtually from 
the first, while other states have utterly failed in every 
effort to establish it? Answers to such questions as 
these would serve to show the most truly significant 
thing now to be discovered concerning democracy: its 
place and office, namely, in the process of political devel- 
opment. What is its relative function, its character- 
istic position and power, in politics viewed as a whole? 

Democracy is of course wrongly conceived when 
treated as merely a body of doctrine, or as simply a 
form of government. It is a stage of development. It 


COLLEGE AND STATE 177 


is not created by aspirations or by new faith: it is built 
up by slow habit. Its process is experience, its basis 
old wont, its meaning national organic unity and ef- 
fectual life. It comes, like manhood, as the fruit of 
youth: immature peoples cannot have it, and the ma- 
turity to which it is vouchsafed is the maturity of free- 
dom and self-control, and no other. It is conduct, and 
its only stable foundation is character. America has 
democracy because she is free; she is not free because 
she has democracy. A particular form of government 
may no more be adopted than a particular type of char- 
acter may be adopted: both institutions and character 
must be developed by conscious effort and through 
transmitted aptitudes. The variety of effects produced 
by democratic principles, therefore, upon different na- 
tions and systems, and even upon the same nation at 
different periods, is susceptible of instructive explana- 
tion. It is not the result of accident merely, nor of good 
fortune, manifestly, that the English race has been 
the only race, outside of quiet, closeted Switzerland, 
the only race, that is, standing forward amidst the 
fierce contests of national rivalries, that has succeeded 
in establishing and maintaining the most liberal forms 
of government. It is, on the contrary, a perfectly 
natural outcome of organic development. ‘The English 
alone have approached popular institutions through 
habit. All other races have rushed prematurely into 
them through mere impatience with habit: have adopted 
democracy, instead of cultivating it. An expansion of 
this contrast would leave standing very little of the rea- 
soning from experience which constitutes so large a part 
of Sir Henry Maine’s plausible Popular Government, 
and would add to Mr. Bryce’s luminous exposition of 
the existing conditions of life and the operative ma- 
chinery of politics in the greatest of republics some- 
thing which might serve as a natural history of repub- 
licanism. 

Mr. Bryce has given us a noble work possessing in 


178 COLLEGE AND STATE 


high perfection almost every element that should make 
students of comparative politics esteem it invaluable. 
If I have regretted that it does not contain more, it has 
been because of the feeling that the author of The 
American Commonwealth, who has given us a vast deal, 
might have given us everything. 


MAKE HASTE SLOWLY 2 


THE ONE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE INAUGURA- 
TION OF GEORGE WASHINGTON, ADDRESS DELIVERED 
APRIL 30, 1889, AT (PLACE NOT GIVEN). FROM 
ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT IN MR. WILSON’S HAND- 
WRITING, IN MRS. WILSON’S POSSESSION. 


| ASISIBIO HINO belongs to-day as of right to 
thoughts of thanksgiving and joy. “To have kept 
_ our national government from destruction or decay for 
one hundred years were itself justification for grati- 
fication and pride. But we have done more than that. 
We are more—much more—than a preserved nation: 
we are a strengthened, elevated, matured nation. We 
have triumphed over difficulties, not by steadfastness 
merely but by progress also. We have had that best 
evidence of health, namely growth. Vastly better, 
greater, more worthy, whether for strength, for unity, 
or for achievement are the Re-United States than were 
the merely United States. We have done more than 
kept faith with the deeds of our Fathers: we have kept 
faith with their spirit also. We cannot doubt that in 
building together a compact and confident nation out of 
the somewhat disagreeing elements which they handled, 
with courage and in hope but not without doubt and mis- 
giving, we have returned them their own with usury. 
Their thirteen talents, coined in various mints, bearing 
no single or standard value, have become in our hands 
thirty-eight talents, made up of coins bearing all the 
same image and superscription, emblems of liberty and 
nationality. 
We may boast, too,—if boasting may have a place— 
that we have led the modern movement of Politics: 
*Title supplied by editors. 
179 


180 COLLEGE AND STATE 


that it is at our hands that popular liberty has received 
its most absolute test and its highest confirmation. 
Never before we gave them scope of empire had the 
principles of democratic government received more than 
a narrow local application. Snug Swiss cantons, but- 
tressed by Nature against the disturbances of European 
politics; medieval cities forcibly holding the feudal 
world a while at arm’s length; Rome straining her city 
constitution to the point of breaking by imposing upon 
it the weight of an Empire’s affairs; the republics of 
Greece ruling territories ridiculously small when com- 
pared with the power and the abiding influence of the 
peoples whom they sustained—none of these afford any 
precedent for this continental rule of the people, so 
familiar to us now, but which we have astonished the 
world by successfully establishing. Our success has 
been on the scale of our geography: democracies there 
had been before and confederacies not a few; but never 
a democracy of sixty millions of people, never a federal 
state as large and as whole as a continent. 

But these great things, which have unquestionably put 
us at the front of the world’s politics, have not been ac- 
complished by those elements of thought and character 
which make for pride and self-gratulation. It is sig- 
nificant of the forces that have made us what we are 
that we celebrate to-day not only the establishment of 
a government but also the inauguration of a man. 
But Washington, it seems to me, though high-statured 
even beyond the other giants of his day, bore in his 
mien and stature the marks of the race to which he 
belonged. In him we may discern the “brief chronicle 


* You know by heart, of course, Mr. Lowell’s fine lines, of 1876: 
“Virginia gave us this imperial man 
Cast in the massive mould 
Of those high-statured ages old 
Which into grander forms our mortal metal ran. 


Mother of States and undiminished men, 
Thou gavest us a Country giving him.” 


COLLEGE AND STATE 181 


and abstract” of a time and a nation. His courageous 
calmness in seasons of political crisis; his solemn sense 
of public duty; his steady aptitude for affairs; his hold 
upon men of various and diverse natures; his capacity 
for persuasive counsel; his boldness without dash, and 
power without display—do we not see in these things 
the perfect epitome of what the slow processes of 
English national history had proved themselves capable 
of producing in the way of manhood and character? 
Washington was neither an accident nor a miracle. 
Neither chance nor a special Providence need be as- 
sumed to account for him. It was God, indeed, who 
gave him to us; but God had been preparing him ever 
since English constitutional history began. He was of 
the same breed with Hampden and Pym and Crom- 
well. Burke and Chatham both recognized him as a 
brother so soon as they saw opened before them the 
credentials of his deeds. He was of such heroic stuff 
as God had for centuries been so graciously and so lav- 
ishly weaving into the character of our race. 

Do you recall that striking story of one of the open- 
ing incidents of the Constitutional Convention related by 
Gouverneur Morris, an eye-witness of scenes? “Of the 
delegates,” he says, ‘‘“some were for halfway measures, 
for fear of displeasing the people; others were anxious 
and doubting. Just before there were enough to form a 
quorum, Washington, standing self-collected in the 
midst of them, his countenance more than usually 
solemn, his eye seeming to look into futurity, said:—‘It 
is too probable that no plan we propose will be adopted. 
Perhaps another dreadful conflict is to be sustained. If, 
to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disap- 
prove, how can we afterwards defend our course? Let 
us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can 
repair; the event is in the hands of God.’” That is an 
utterance, not of statesmanship merely, but of char- 
acter as well: and do we not understand that character; 
do we not thrill at its expression? It strikes to the 


182 COLLEGE AND STATE 


quick of our sensibilities because we are of the same 
race and derivation that this man was of. 

I press this point because it seems to me the point of 
chief instruction and inspiration, the best point, of to- 
day’s suggestion. There is no strength in mere self- 
gratulation: there is no hope in being sure. Enlightened 
endeavour is the law of progress: a stout-hearted dissat- 
isfaction with what has been done, a clear-sighted under- 
standing of what there remains to do, an undaunted 
spirit to undertake and achieve it. I fear that we are be- 
coming a little prone as a nation to mistake the real 
nature of our success. It does not lie in the forms but in 
the essence of our institutions. We are not great in pop- 
ular government because we invented written constitu- 
tions: for we did not invent them. We are not successful 
because we put into our constitutions new devices 
whereby to moderate the disorders or facilitate the 
better influences of politics: for we originated no de- 
vices. We are great because of what we perfected and 
fulfilled, not because of anything that we discovered: 
and it is only by extending such lines of development 
as can be clearly traced backwards through the normal 
evolutions of politics in the past that we can make 
further permanent advances. We did not break with 
the past: we understood and obeyed it, rather. ‘The 
most thorough way of understanding ourselves lies 
through an intimate acquaintance with the long proc- 
esses of our breeding. ‘There are no individual discov- 
eries to be made in politics as there are in astronomy 
or biology or physics; society grows as a whole, and as 
a whole grows into knowledge of itself. Society is an 
organism, which does not develop by the cunning 
leadership of a single member so much as by a slow 
maturing and an all-round adjustment, though led at 
last into self-consciousness and self-command by those 
who best divine the laws of its growth. 

So long were we compelled to centre our thoughts in 
national politics upon the interpretation of our written 


COLLEGE AND STATE 183 


standards—so short is the period during which we have 
been excused from looking exclusively into our consti- 
tutions for the sanction and substance of our national 
life, that it is open to question whether we have even 
yet accepted the fact that the real foundations of politi- 
cal life in the United States are to be found elsewhere 
than in our legal documents. 

Our politics and our character were derived from a 


“land that freemen till 
That sober-suited Freedom chose, 
The land where, girt with friends or foes, 
A man may speak the thing he will; 


“A land of settled government, 

A land of just and old renown, 
Where freedom broadens slowly down 
From precedent to precedent: 


“Where faction seldom gathers head, 

But by degrees to fulness wrought, 

The strength of some diffusive thought 
Hath time and space to work and spread.” 


We have been strong and successful—and shall be— 
just in proportion to our fidelity to this so great heri- 
tage of political manliness. It is no light thing to have 
such traditions behind us: liberty is not something that 
can be laid away in a document, a completed work. It 
is an organic principle, a principle of life, renewing and 
being renewed. Democratic institutions are never done 
—they are, like the living tissue, always a-making. It 
is a strenuous thing this of living the life of a free 
people: and we cannot escape the burden of our inheri- 
tance. 

But this burden is light: the only grievous burden is 
to be held back from liberty by a heritage of subjection. 
Those of you who have followed the course of events 
in France and who share with all lovers of liberty the 
anxiety caused by the present posture of her af- 
fairs will know whence my best illustration will be 


184 COLLEGE AND STATE 


drawn. You know how straight M. Monod has pointed 
his finger at his country’s trouble in what he says in the 
current (the April) number of the Contemporary 
Review. “France,” he says, “‘is suffering mainly from 
moral instability and diseases of the imagination, the 
result of a too sudden rupture with her own traditions.”’ 
“After every revolution,” he adds,—and he is right,— 
“and in spite of 17 changes of constitution in a single 
century, she always rights herself, and knows no pause 
in her intellectual and industrial activity, nor any de- 
cline in her material force.” This is indeed true. In 
her habit of being prosperous France is established; in 
her habit of making her wit tell in literature and in art 
she is well grounded; but the habit of being free she as 
yet most imperfectly possesses. ‘That habit, instead of 
having something like a thousand years of steady prac- 
tice in it with her as with us, has but the uneven exer- 
tions of a brief hundred years of feverish change. She 
is acquiring it: but it would be a miracle could she 
adopt it, as one would put on a garment. We only 
make ourselves contemptible when we despise France 
because she has failed at the miracle: we only make 
ourselves ridiculous when we pity her; she deserves 
sympathy and she will achieve success: we cannot do 
better than learn a lesson from her. 

The profitable thing for us to remember is, that, 
though the saving habit in politics may be acquired by 
wisdom and sober, steadfast endeavour, which are very 
rare, it may be lost by folly, which is very common. 
Evidently wisdom and endeavour have had rare good 
opportunities in America during the century that is past: 
wisdom is not difficult where resources are unbounded; 
endeavour is not arduous where there is exceeding rich 
reward. But the century which begins to-day will doubt- 
less make a very different distribution of its favours 
among us. It is easier to be new than to be old—far 
lighter work to be pioneers needing mere muscle and 
physical courage, than patiently and resolutely to face 


COLLEGE AND STATE 185 


the problems of a crowded and perplexed civilization. 
It was easier to drive out an army of English troops 
than it will be to assimilate a heterogeneous horde of 
immigrants. It required less self-possession to establish 
our governments than it will require to maintain them: 
the principles on which they should be constructed to 
meet our needs in the beginning were much plainer to 
see than are the principles upon which they must be 
modified to meet the needs of the present and future. 

For us this is the centennial year of Washington’s 
inauguration; but for Europe it is the centennial year 
of the French Revolution. One hundred years ago we 
gained, and Europe lost, self-command, self-possession. 
But since then we have been steadily receiving into our 
midst and to full participation in our national life the 
very people whom their home politics have familiarized 
with revolution: our own equable blood we have suf- 
fered to receive into it the most feverish blood of the 
restless old world. We are facing an ever-increasing 
difficulty of self-possession with ever deteriorating 
materials: for your only reliable stuff in this strain of 
politics is Character. 


Think! Our task is to be 


“A nation yet, the rulers and the ruled— 
Some sense of duty, something of a faith, 
Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made, 
Some patient force to change them when we will, 
Some civic manhood firm against the crowd.” 


And our material? ‘‘Minds cast in every mould of 
race, minds inheriting every bias of environment, 
warped by the histories of a score of different nations, 
warmed or chilled, closed or expanded by almost every 
climate of the globe!”’ 

This is not the place or the occasion for the discussion 
of policies: we are here only to renew our vows at 
the altar of Liberty, only to look ourselves in the face, 
to examine and know ourselves,—to confess ourselves 


186 COLLEGE AND STATE 


to God and ask of him succour and guidance. It be- 
hooves us once and again to stand face to face with our 
ideals, to renew our enthusiasms, to reckon again our 
duties, to take fresh views of our aims and fresh cour- 
age for their pursuit. “To-day we should stand close to 
the thought and close to the hearts of those who gave 
our nation life. The tasks of the future are not to be 
less but greater than the tasks of the past: it is our part 
to improve even the giant breed of which we came— 
to return to the high-statured ages: to weld our people 
together in a patriotism as pure, a wisdom as elevated, 
a virtue as sound as those of the greater generation 
whom to-day we hold in special and grateful remem- 
brance—a nation knowing 


“Its duties;—prompt to move, but firm to wait,— 
Knowing, things rashly sought are rarely found: 
That, for the functions of an ancient State— 
Strong by her charters, free because imbound, 
Servant of Providence, not slave of Fate— 
Perilous is sweeping change, all chance unsound.” 


A SYSTEM OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AND 
CONSTITUTIONAL LAW 


A REVIEW OF “POLITICAL SCIENCE AND CONSTITU- 
TIONAL LAW’! BY JOHN W. BURGESS. FROM THE 
“ATLANTIC MONTHLY,’ MAY, 1891, VOL. 67, 
PP. 694-699. WRITTEN DURING MR. WILSON’S 
FIRST YEAR AT PRINCETON AS A PROFESSOR. 


M R. BURGESS has produced a work possessing con- 
spicuous merits and conspicuous faults. It will 
both command admiration and provoke criticism; and 
it will be fortunate if the criticism does not overcrow 
the praise which it must receive. For the very fact that 
its good and its bad points are equally accentuated tends 
to make its bad points seem more prominent than any 
just estimate should pronounce them. It will serve the 
purposes alike of specific appreciation and specific criti- 
cism if, at the outset, a general chart be made of Mr. 
Burgess’s method and thought, and an outline of the 
excellences and defects which must be examined and 
estimated before his work can be appreciated as a whole. 

Its excellences are excellences both of method and of 
thought. There is the utmost clearness and adequacy 
of analysis throughout the book: nowhere in the two 
volumes does one lose his way in the subject, or doubt 
for a moment concerning the bearings of what he reads 
upon the subject-matter as a whole. There is also, of 
course, what successful analysis always secures, namely, 
perfect consistency everywhere; there is almost com- 
plete logical wholeness in the exposition. The reader 
enjoys the satisfaction, so rare in this day of easy writ- 

* Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law. In. two vol- 
umes. By John W. Burgess. Boston: Ginn & Co. 1891. 

187 


188 COLLEGE AND STATE 


ing, of being nowhere in doubt as to the author’s 
meaning. 

These are excellences of a high order, and are excel- 
lences, obviously, not of method only, but of thought as 
well. The thought is for the most part clear, consistent, 
and certain. There is accurate knowledge throughout, 
also, and thoroughness in setting it forth. 

The faults of the work, though equally evident, are 
not so easy of statement: the mind of the reader finds 
them distinct and irritating, but his vocabulary may find 
them subtle and difficult of explicit exposure. Stated in 
the plainest words that come to hand, they consist in a 
mechanical and incorrect style, a dogmatic spirit, and a 
lack of insight into institutions as detailed expressions 
of life, not readily consenting to be broadly and posi- 
tively analyzed and classified. 

We have now our scheme for a more minute and just 
examination of the contents of the work, whose im- 
portance no one can deny without fortifying his judg- 
ment by not reading it. The title of the work indicates 
at once the principal distinction upon which its treat- 
ment is based: one portion of it is devoted to those 
topics touching the nature and operations of the state 
which the author conceives to fall mainly within the 
domain of political science; another and quite distinct 
portion embodies such topics as fall exclusively within 
the domain of constitutional law. A sharp line of divi- 
sion is run between these two domains. Political science 
deals with those processes, whether legal or revolu- 
tionary, and with those conceptions, whether juristic or 
lying entirely outside the thought of the lawyer, by 
virtue of which states come into existence, take historic 
shape, create governments and institutions, and at pleas- 
ure change or discard what forms or laws they must in 
order to achieve development. Constitutional law, on 
the other hand, has a much narrower scope. It deals 
only with such part of political life as is operative within 
the forms of law, and obedient to its commands and 


COLLEGE AND STATE 189 


sanctions. Juristic method scrutinizes laws, examines 
their contents, ponders their meaning, seeks to elicit 
from them their logical purpose; does not concern itself 
with what they ought to contain, but only with what 
they do contain. ‘The method of political science is 
much broader and freer. It does not hesitate to ques- 
tion laws as to their right to exist, to indulge bold specu- 
lations as to their foundations in the historical develop- 
ment and purposes of the people which has produced 
them, to account revolution just and necessary upon oc- 
casion, to say that laws are valid only so long as they 
contain some part of the national life and impede no 
essential measure of reform. Political science, in short, 
studies the forces of which laws are only the partial and 
temporary manifestations, while constitutional law is a 
study of conditions wholly statical. 

Almost all that is most individual and important in 
Mr. Burgess’s thought lies within the first portion of 
his work, which deals with the greater topics of political 
science. Lhe two topics which stand forward most 
prominently in his treatment, as including all the rest, 
are Sovereignty and Liberty. ‘The cardinal questions 
of systematic politics are, first, With whom does su- 
preme political power rest, where is sovereignty lodged? 
and second, What liberty does the sovereign vouchsafe 
to the individual, and what are the guarantees of that 
liberty? But neither of these questions, nor any other 
questions whatever, either of political science or of 
constitutional law, can be discussed with any assurance 
of success without a most careful and consistent observ- 
ance of the distinction between the state and the gov- 
ernment. This is a distinction fundamental to every 
portion, great or sma'l, of Mr. Burgess’s thought. 
Always, under whatever constitution, distinguishable in 
thought, the state and the government are in most mod- 
ern constitutions distinguishable also in fact. Back of 
the government, or else contained in it, is that other 
entity in which there persists a life higher than that of 


190 COLLEGE AND STATE 


the government, and more enduring: that entity is the 
state, which gives to the government its form and its 
vitality. State and government are never identical 
except in mere point of organization; they may have the 
same organs, but they are not on that account the same 
thing. It is the state which is sovereign; whatever per- 
son or body of persons constitutes the sole vital source 
of political power in a nation, that person or body of 
persons is the state, and is sovereign. In those periods 
of the history of politics in which the will of a king or 
of a prince has been decisive of law and conclusive as 
to individual liberty, the monarch has himself been the 
state. Wherever minorities have established them- 
selves as a ruling class, obeyed by all organs of govern- 
ment, there minorities have wielded sovereignty, have 
been the state. Whenever majorities command, the 
nation has itself become sovereign, has been made the 
state. 

So much for the fact of the state as a thing separable 
from the forms of government, and merely operative 
through those forms. ‘The organization of the state is 
another matter. Its organization may be identical with 
the organization of the government, as it practically 
is in England, where the House of Commons is sov- 
ereign; or it may be distinct from the organization of 
the government, as it is among ourselves, where our 
constitutions are not changed by ordinary legislative 
process, but by other machinery specially arranged for 
the purpose. Only the state is superior to the laws; the 
government is subject to the laws. The state makes 
constitutions; governments give effect to them. What- 
ever power can change the constitution, that power is 
the state organized. Thus in England the government 
is organized in the Queen, the Lords, and the Com- 
mons; but the state is organized in the House of 
Commons alone, whose will, whenever it is clearly de- 
terminate, is supreme. In France the state is organized 
in the National Assembly sitting at Versailles; the gov- 


COLLEGE AND STATE Ig! 


ernment, in the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate, and 
the President and Ministers. In Germany the govern- 
ment consists of the Emperor, the Reichstag, and the 
Bundesrath; but sovereignty resides in the Reichstag 
and a majority of the Bundesrath great enough to in- 
clude at least forty-five out of the fifty-eight votes of 
that body. In the United States, while the government 
is organized in the houses of Congress and the Presi- 
dent, the state has an alternative organization, repre- 
sented by the two alternative methods of amending the 
Constitution permitted by Article V. of that instrument. 

Nor does the significance of this distinction between 
state and government stop here. It is carried much 
further, to the upsetting of not a little familiar phrase- 
ology; for it invades that portion of Mr. Burgess’s book 
which is devoted to comparative constitutional law, and 
commands his discussion of the forms of government. 
We can no longer speak of a federal state, but only of 
a federal government; neither does there exist any dual 
state, though dual governments there may be and have 
been. Every state is single and indivisible, let govern- 
ments have what duality or complexity they may. The 
sovereign body which can make or unmake constitutions 
is in every case a single body; but the governments 
which give effect to constitutions may be made up of 
as many distinct and balanced parts as constitution 
makers may succeed in giving them. Sweden-Norway, 
for example, is not a dual state, for there is no such 
thing, but two states bound together in some important 
matters under a common government, which you may, 
if you choose, call a dual government. 

If it be asked, Why must the sovereign will be always 
conceived of as single and indivisible, — why may it not 
be dual or treble, or multiple? the answer is ready and 
emphatic: Because sovereignty is by very definition 
supreme will, and there can be but one supreme will. 
This is an old answer, sometimes supposed to have 


192 COLLEGE AND STATE 


become long ago axiomatic; only the reasoning here 
built upon it contains anything that is new. 

Such is the theoretical side of the book, such its struc- 
ture of thought. The importance and serviceableness 
of such an analysis will not for a moment be doubted. 
It is only in the application of it to the actual facts of 
political life, the actual phenomena of state growth, 
that difficulty enters. Mr. Burgess himself does not 
seem to feel that there are any difficulties. He is as 
confident in his application of this analysis as in his con- 
struction of it. It is characteristic of him to have no 
doubts; to him the application of his analysis seems the 
perfect and final justification of it. His thoughtful 
readers, however, will experience much more difhculty 
and have many more doubts. For he makes specific 
application of his analysis to the governments of the 
United States, England, France, and Germany — goy- 
ernments with which every student of politics is familiar, 
and whose history is known in detail. It is in his treat- 
ment of the history of these governments — a treat- 
ment in every instance as brief as it is confident — that 
our author is at his boldest in making trial of his 
theories. He subjects them to great risks in the process, 
and they by no means escape damage. Or prehaps it 
would be more just to say that, in seeking a very abso- 
lute exemplification of the truth of his theories at every 
stage of complex national histories, like those of Ger- 
many, France, and England, he displays an extraordi- 
nary dogmatic readiness to force many intricate and 
diverse things to accommodate themselves to a few 
simple formulas. He believes that he can specifically 
identify on the one hand the state, and on the other the 
government, in each period of the manifold develop- 
ment of these great nations, —that he can point out 
exactly, that is, the real possessors of sovereign influ- 
ence or authority during each principal age of their 
political growth; and the attempt must give every 
reader accustomed to deal with the multiform and deli- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 193 


cate phenomena of such growth a distressing impression 
of crudeness and dogmatic presumption. 

Perhaps the most striking example of this quality is 
afforded by Mr. Burgess’s confident analysis of our own 
national history in the terms of his theory. Without 
touch of hesitation, he formulates our history as fol- 
lows: A national “‘state’’ came into existence among us 
in 1774 with the assembling of the first Continental 
Congress; so long as the Continental Congress con- 
tinued to sit, it represented that state in organization; 
when that state, thus in Congress assembled, consented 
to the formation of the Confederation, under the Arti- 
cles framed in 1777 and put into operation in 1781, it 
consented to its own dissolution, for those Articles at- 
tributed statehood to the several commonwealths, deny- 
ing in every provision the existence of any single 
national sovereign will; but in the Constitution of 
1789 the national state reasserted itself and regained 
organization, while the commonwealths lost their state- 
hood, and became once again merely governments. 
These conclusions Mr. Burgess reaches, not as a lawyer, 
of course, for they are without sanction in our legal 
history, but as a political scientist: they are the ‘‘facts”’ 
of the case as contradistinguished from the law of the 
case,—a distinction upon which he is careful to insist. 
The distinction is indeed valid,—nay, obvious enough; 
but many there be that are betrayed into singular error 
in the use of it. For the facts have to be determined; 
and while it is generally easy enough to determine what 
the law is, political fact is subtle and elusive, not to be 
caught up whole in any formula. It is a thing which 
none but a man who is at once a master of sentences and 
a seer can bring entire before the mind’s eye in its habit 
as it lived, so many-sided is it and so quick to change. 

It is always necessary to ascertain, therefore, just 
what a writer means by the antithesis between law and 
fact. Mr. Burgess believes, as we have seen, that a 
“state,” with a single sovereign will, sprang into existe 


194 COLLEGE AND STATE 


ence, however imperfect its organization, with the as- 
sembling of the Continental Congress of 1774. He 
evidently, therefore, excludes opinion altogether from 
the category of ‘‘fact’’; for he quite certainly would not 
undertake to prove that in contemporary thought there 
was any real recognition of the occurrence of so mo- 
mentous an event. He admits, indeed, with perhaps a 
touch of regret, that ‘“‘the dull mind of the average 
legislator cannot at once be made conscious of such 
changes”; and he would probably admit also that even 
legislators who were not dull, like Madison and Hamil- 
ton, for example, were quite unconscious that a state 
had been born in 1774, and destroyed in 1781. The 
truth is, of course, that political fact is made up largely 
of opinion. Opinion is no less a fact than is heat, or 
cold, or gravitation. It is a determining force, and for 
that reason a controlling fact; in political development 
it is the fact of facts. If Mr. Burgess could but appreci- 
ate this, it would give life and significance to his theories 
such as in his own hands they do not possess. The 
national “‘state,’’ with its sense of unity and of a com- 
mon purpose, if democratic in structure, comes always 
slowly into existence, with the habit of coOperation and 
the growth of the national idea. “The commonwealths 
of 1774 esteemed themselves states, and were states; 
adding nothing to their independence and dignity, as- 
suredly, by the arrangement of 1781, but on the con- 
trary consciously curtailing their privileges thereby. 
States they remained both in consciousness and purpose 
when they entered the union consummated in 1789. 
The national ‘‘state’”’ has come into existence since then 
by virtue of a revolution of ideas, by reason of national 
union and growth and achievement, through a process 
also of struggle and of civil war. A state cannot be 
born unawares, cannot spring unconsciously into being. 
To think otherwise is to conceive mechanically, and not 
in terms of life. To teach otherwise is to deaden effort, 
to leave no function for patriotism. If the processes of 


COLLEGE AND STATE 195 


politics are unconscious and unintelligent, why then this 
blind mechanism may take care of itself; there is noth- 
ing for us to do. 

The truth seems to be that Mr. Burgess does not 
keep the method of the jurist and the method of the 
political scientist quite so distinct as he supposes. The 
juristic method is the method of logic: it squares with 
formulated principles; it interprets laws only, and con- 
crete modes of action. The method of political science, 
on the contrary, is the interpretation of life; its instru- 
ment is insight, a nice understanding of subtle, unformu- 
lated conditions. For this latter method Mr. Burgess’s 
mind seems unfit; the plain logic of concrete modes of 
action is much more natural to him than the logic of 
circumstance and opinion. Where he employs the forms 
and expressions of induction, therefore, he will often be 
found using in reality the processes of a very absolute 
deduction. He has strong powers of reasoning, but he 
has no gift of insight. This is why he'is so good at 
logical analysis, and so poor at the interpretation of 
history. [his is why what he says appears to have a 
certain stiff, mechanical character, lacking flexibility and 
vitality. It seems to have been constructed, not con- 
ceived. It suggests nothing; it utterly lacks depth and 
color. As a matter of fact, these defects do not invali- 
date in the least the serviceable analysis upon which the 
whole work is founded, neither do they rob its very 
excellent and lucid discussions of comparative constitu- 
tional law of their significance; but they do put the 
author at a great disadvantage with his reader by cre- 
ating the impression that the whole matter of the 
volumes has been arbitrarily conceived. 

Mr. Burgess, constructing thus, does not write in the 
language of literature, but in the language of science. 
The sentences of the scientist are not sentences in the 
literary sense,—they are simply the ordered pieces of. 
statements; they are not built upon any artistic plan, but 
upon the homeliest principles of grammatical joinery, 


196 COLLEGE AND STATE 


which cares nothing for color, or tone, or contrast, but 
contents itself with more serviceable construction out 
of any materials that will hold together mechanically. 
There is no ‘“‘style” about such writing; words are used 
simply as counters, without regard to the material out 
of which they are made, or to the significance which 
they bear in their hearts. A book thus constituted may 
be read much and consulted often, but can itself never 
live: it is not made up of living tissue. It may suggest 
life, but it cannot impart it. Doubtless the artificers of 
such writings do not pretend to be making literature, 
but they have no choice; if they do not write literature, 
they do not write truth. For political science cannot 
be truthfully constructed except by the literary method; 
by the method, that is, which seeks to reproduce life in 
speech. Constitutional law may perhaps dispense with 
the literary method in its expositions, but political 
science cannot. Politics can be successfully studied only 
as life; as the vital embodiment of opinions, prejudices, 
sentiments, the product of human endeavor, and there- 
fore full of human characteristics of whim and igno- 
rance and half knowledge; as a process of circumstance 
and of interacting impulses, a thing growing with 
thought and habit and social development—a thing 
various, complex, subtle, defying all analysis save that 
of insight. And the language of direct sight is the lan- 
guage of literature. 

It would not be possible to criticise these volumes in 
detail without criticising them in very great detail. The 
strong ideas that stand out in them will prove eminently 
serviceable to subsequent writers in the great field which 
they seek to occupy, and will doubtless pass into the 
literature of the subject; but Mr. Burgess’s specific judg- 
ments upon the political history of the four great na- 
tions with whose institutions he chiefly concerns himself, 
his judgments also upon races and upon race develop- 
ment in the opening chapters of the work, every attempt 
that he makes to unfold the interior meanings of na- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 197 


tional political development, must provoke sharp dis- 
sent and criticism. Perhaps this, in the absence of a 
suggestive method of treatment, will be the book’s 
means of stimulation. Its very dogmatism, indeed, will 
prove not unpleasant to those who have experienced a 
touch of ennui in this age of cautious, timid writing. It 
is an agreeable shock to hear once more the old confi- 
dent phrase, “I have demonstrated.” You may not 
agree, but you may possibly admire the boldness of 
temperament which makes such phrases possible. 

Mr. Burgess will not have done a bad thing if he 
heartens us once more to get clear ideas and put muscle 
into their defense. That is one way to rouse truth, 
though it may not be the gentlest or the best way. 


MR. CLEVELAND'S CABINET 


THE ‘“‘REVIEW OF REVIEWS” (AMERICAN), APRIL, 1893, 
VOL. VII, PP. 286-297. 


| Dae is much to arrest attention and challenge 
comment in Mr. Cleveland’s cabinet appointments. 
He has so evidently chosen his advisers with independ- 
ence of judgment not upon conventional lines, but upon 
lines of individual choice, that the make-up of the cabi- 
net furnishes us with a fresh test of his interesting 
character as a leader and ruler. ’ The career of Mir 
Cleveland has been an individual career from the first. 
He has been a leader among citizens rather than a 
leader of parties. He has dominated his party because 
he represented a great force of unpartisan opinion. His 
career, too, has been exclusively executive within the 
field, not of the choice of measures, but of the choice 
of men and of just means for the conduct of the govern- 
ment on its business side. Equipped with an admirable 
practical judgment from the outset, and with an extraor- 
dinary capacity for understanding the larger aspects of 
great questions, he has yet, apparently, come slowly into 
the possession of general views regarding the legislative 
policy of the government. 

These views, moreover, would seem to have come 
to him as to a very thoughtful man of affairs rather 
than as to a natural student of policy, as the result of 
the direct contact of a strong and sagacious judgment 
with the practical conduct of the business of the govern- 
ment. No one can doubt for a moment his extraordi- 
nary powers of mind. ‘Those powers do not seem bril- 
liant because they operate without display of force. 
They are equable, unhurried, moving, it would seem, 

198 


COLLEGE AND STATE 199 


through a certain inevitable course of judgment to con- 
clusions which do not take them by surprise; and the 
reason he has so riveted the attention and engaged the 
admiration of his countrymen is that he possesses in per- 
fection that largeness and candor of view, that strong 
sagacity in affairs, and that solidity of judgment which 
characterize the best Americans. He is a typical Amer- 
ican, albeit of the best type, and his countrymen believe 
in him without always knowing why. 

He approached his present exalted station, neverthe- 
less, through a series of almost exclusively executive 
ofices, which he had occupied, not as a man who had 
chosen a public career, but as an independent citizen 
who had consented to lend his individual character to 
the task of bettering the methods of public administra- 
tion. He has always disconcerted the politicians by 
selecting, for such offices as he had to give, men like 
himself in their disconnection from politics—men whom 
the politicians had never heard of, and consequently 
found it difficult to reckon with. His conception of the 
way in which government ought to be conducted is iden- 
tical with the conception which thrust him forward to 
occupy offices of the greatest influence within the gift 
of the people—the conception which gave Andrew Jack- 
son the presidency. He believes that what the govern- 
net needs at moments of apparent lethargy or demoral- 
ization is the infusion of new blood, the disinterested 
service of men untainted by party management. He has 
chosen his present cabinet on that plan. He would not 
have been true to his career or to his character had he 
not done so. He does not regard it as important that 
the country at large should know the men he has 
selected. The country has trusted him with the organ- 
ization of the government, and, with his customary 
courage, he has assumed all the responsibility of the 
choice, taking, not men sifted out of the general mass 
by the processes of public life, but men whom his own 


200 COLLEGE AND STATE 


judgment approved; and no one need be surprised or 
chagrined. 

That he has chosen well in all cases no one can safely 
say until the four years of his administration shall have 
made full test of the men. With one exception, Mr. 
Richard Olney, who may, perhaps, be reckoned the 
scholar of the little group, the members of the new 
cabinet are all practical men, like Mr. Cleveland him- 
self, with minds formed by experience, rather than by 
books or by the observation of affairs lying beyond the 
immediate sphere of their own lives. With two notable 
exceptions—Mr. Carlisle and Mr. Herbert—they have 
none of them had any such direct acquaintance with 
public questions as would be necessary to give them ease 
and steadiness of judgment in the exercise of the func- 
tions which they have now undertaken, unless Mr. 
Lamont busily hived wisdom in such matters while he 
served Mr. Cleveland as private secretary. With but 
a single exception—Mr. Lamont—they have all had the 
training of lawyers, though Mr. Carlisle and Mr. 
Herbert have doubtless added a great deal to that train- 
ing during their long connection with the public business 
in Congress, where they have played no narrow role. 
Mr. Morton is said to have found the law too “un- 
practical’ to satisfy his full-blooded ardor to be doing 
something that would tell at once; he, therefore, has 
made it only one instrument among many to enable him 
to live his hard pioneer life in Nebraska. Mr. Hoke 
Smith is not suspected of knowing more than enough 
law to serve the practical purposes of his professional 
engagements from day to day. It is a cabinet of law- 
yers nevertheless, and two of its members, Mr. 
Gresham and Mr. Olney, may fairly be called great 
lawyers—men fit to be jurists if they would but take the 
pains. As a body of practical men they are accustomed 
to overcoming difficulties, and the ignorance of the 
majority of them as to what exactly they will have to do 
in their several departments will be but a new difficulty 


COLLEGE AND STATE 201 


to surmount. They may be counted on to learn rapidly. 
They are, at any rate, men of uncommonly fine physique 
and can easily outlive their sentence of four years at 
hard labor. ‘The reporters have amused themselves 
and us with specific details as to their weight, which ts 
most of it, they assure us, in bone and sinew, very little 
of it in mere adipose tissue, which might not stand the 
strain of too close application to executive routine. A 
stalwart set of men, with the good humor of giants for 
the most part,—until too outrageously assaulted by 
office seekers. And no part of the country, it would 
seem, has a monopoly in the production of giants. 
These big men come from widely separated States. 
Mr. Smith, of Georgia, is as large as Mr. Bissell, of 
New York, and each of these is bigger than Mr. Car- 
lisle, the Kentuckian, who comes from a region where 
the men notoriously grow tall and full chested. Mr. 
Olney, too, is said to be of a height, an athletic build, 
and a distinction of bearing striking enough to have 
entitled him to be noted and known long ago outside his 
profession. You would know such men not to be insig- 
nificant, wherever you might chance to see them. It is 
a humorous way of estimating importance, not set down 
in any ethical manual; but it has its obvious usefulness 
as a standard for the general eye. 

Compared, man for man, with their predecessors in 
Mr. Cleveland’s official counsels, they afford material 
for some marked contrasts. ‘The first time he filled the 
office of Secretary of State Mr. Cleveland followed 
time-honored precedents. Mr. Bayard represented the 
oldest and best traditions of American public life. He 
came of a race of statesmen, and had fair claim to rank 
with his forebears in the notable line of family suc- 
cession. He was, by common consent, one of the fore- 
most men on the Democratic side of the Senate; he had 
served on several of the most important committees of 
that body, the President’s Great Council in foreign 
affairs; and when he assumed the duties of Secretary of 


202 COLLEGE AND STATE 


State he only passed from one branch of the public 
service into another not far removed. The grave ques- 
tion was, Did not the Senate lose too much by his 
transference? He had as great familiarity with the 
policy of the government as Mr. Blaine, his immediate 
predecessor, and greater familiarity than Mr. Evarts, 
the predecessor of Mr. Blaine. His knowledge of the 
course of policy, moreover, was more a knowledge of 
questions considered upon their merits than Mr. 
Blaine’s, whose close acquaintance with public affairs 
consisted in a knowledge of men in their groupings 
rather than in any mastery of questions considered apart 
from men. Judge Gresham has usually lived at a con- 
siderable remove from such business as his forerunners 
were immersed in. His fine qualities of mind, his engag- 
ing liberality of temper and elevation of moral view, 
have been manifested chiefly upon the bench in the 
West. For all his reading, his knowledge of men and 
of the history of the country, his wide sympathies and 
quick insight, he will be a novice in adjusting the foreign 
relations of the country. Mastery in such matters 
cometh not by observation merely. Besides the wishes 
of the President, he will have only his own legal ca- 
pacity and his own natural apprehension of right and 
wrong to guide him. Fortunately our foreign relations 
are generally simple enough to require little more. But 
the experienced officials of the State Department will 
find their new chief very naif and ignorant about many 
things which seem to them obvious arrangements of 
Providence. 

It seems a pity, too, to waste so fine a Secretary of the 
Interior, as it seems certain Mr. Gresham would have 
made, on the novel field of foreign affairs. Other 
Presidents have taken their Secretaries of State from 
the interior of the country; but Henry Clay was already 
the leading spirit in public affairs before he took that 
post; Lewis Cass was a Nestor among the statesmen of 
his day when Buchanan called him to the cabinet; Elihu 


COLLEGE AND STATE 203 


Washburne had served in Congress until he led, by 
sheer force of good service, in almost everything that it 
undertook. He was Secretary of State but a week (but 
six days, to be very accurate), but he had had experience 
enough in the conduct of the government’s business to 
have remained Secretary of State for all the eight years 
of General Grant’s terms. Mr. Gresham brings with 
him from the interior a minute knowledge of the ques- 
tions of the interior, the questions of interstate com- 
merce, of railway monopoly on the grand scale, of iand 
grants and agricultural depression,—to enter, not the 
Department which deals with such matters, but the 
Department which looks away from home to questions 
affecting the exterior interests of the country. He was 
Postmaster-General for a year and a half in the cabinet 
of President Arthur, and the Post Office, the world sup- 
poses, demands little more of its chief than a talent for 
business; but the Secretaryship of State? ‘This is cer- 
tainly an appointment to provoke comment! It would 
seem a pity, I say, to lose so fine a Secretary of the 
Interior in order that a man of brilliant gifts may have 
the honor of the chief post in the Administration. 

But not only, or chiefly, because it is in such wise out 
of the line of previous appointments, is this elevation of 
Judge Gresham to the office of Secretary of State re- 
markable. Mr. Gresham may do well or ill as Secre- 
tary of State—his talents fit him to do brilliantly even 
with a novice’s hand. ‘The startling feature of the ap- 
pointment, as everybody knows, is that until last sum- 
mer he was a Republican, and a Republican of such 
influence and importance in the West that he was seri- 
ously thought of as a candidate for the Republican 
presidential nomination! When the issue was squarely 
joined between the parties on the tariff question he de- 
clared that he could not act with his former party, but 
must vote for Mr. Cleveland; and his announcement of 
his purpose to do so was one of the notable incidents of 
the campaign. It was reckoned widely influential in 


204 COLLEGE AND STATE 


changing votes in the great States of Indiana and Illi- 
nois, where his name stands for courage, sagacity, in- 
tegrity and public spirit. Finding this notable man thus 
on his way to the Democratic party, Mr. Cleveland 
called upon him to make the whole journey at a single 
stage and accept at the hands of a Democratic Admin- 
istration the post that stands first on the list of cabinet 
appointments. It was a bold step to take, both for Mr. 
Cleveland and for Judge Gresham. It is the most orig- 
inal thing Mr. Cleveland has done in all his striking 
career of independent choice. The politicians had 
grown accustomed to being surprised by his appoint- 
ments; this time they were dumfounded. 

What the result will be a prudent man should be slow 
to predict. Signs are not wanting that the Republican 
party is going, or at any rate may presently go, to 
pieces; and signs are fairly abundant that the Demo- 
cratic party is rapidly being made over by the stirring 
and disturbing energy of the extraordinary man who is 
now President. It may be that Mr. Gresham’s acces- 
sion to the Democratic cabinet means that great inter- 
ests and great forces of thought in the Northwest are 
now turning about to the assistance of the Democratic 
party, Judge Gresham being their gift to the counsels of 
that party. Mr. Cleveland has been steadily effecting a 
revolution in the purposes and methods of the Demo- 
cratic party by drawing so many new men about him, by 
assisting to shelve so many older men of the Democratic 
party of former days. The party has grown bold and 
aggressive and certain of its own mind in consequence 
of the change. Mr. Cleveland’s present term of office 
may afford him time and opportunity to complete the 
transformation. Young men are eager to serve him; 
and a Democratic party of young men is the most for- 
midable danger the Republicans have to fear—the best 
hope that the Democrats have to cherish. 

There is a singular and quite admirable mixture of 
conservatism, however, in the new President’s methods. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 205 


Mr. Carlisle and Mr. Herbert are living examples that 
he has not broken with tradition in filling the great of- 
fices of State, and very important examples indeed they 
are. In both of these appointments Mr. Cleveland has 
followed some of the oldest and very best traditions of 
the government. Except for the Hawaiian matter, no 
questions of delicacy now press for immediate attention 
in the Department of State, but there is every reason to 
believe that its financial policy will be the most im- 
portant feature of this Administration, and Mr. Cleve- 
land has shown real statesmanship in placing at the 
head of the Treasury Department a man who is not 
only a real leader of his party, but its leader first of all 
and most notably in the field of financial legislation. 
Together with Mr. Morrison and Mr. Mills, he pre- 
pared it, by long and doubtful parliamentary battle, for 
the policy which it has now accepted from Mr. Cleve- 
land himself. In poise and in the quiet masterfulness 
that makes a leader he is superior to both his comrades 
in that struggle. His elevation to the post of Secretary 
of the Treasury, moreover, redresses the balance of 
authority within the party which was for a time dis- 
turbed by the election of Mr. Crisp to the Speakership 
of the House two years ago. Mr. Manning and Mr. 
Fairchild, of Mr. Cleveland’s former cabinet, were 
admirable business men; but something more than mere 
business capacity is needed in the Treasury at this junc- 
ture. Questions of financial policy have become exi- 
gent, and it was proper that a past master in financial 
legislation should be called to preside over the 
Department. 

It is doubtful, indeed, whether the Treasury should 
ever be considered a mere business department. Gen- 
eral Grant, it is understood, once invited Mr. A. T. 
Stewart, of New York, to occupy the post of Secretary 
of the Treasury, upon the theory that the Treasury 
Department was not essentially different in kind from 
a great commercial establishment. But the financial 


206 COLLEGE AND STATE 


legislation of Congress is so dependent upon the Treas- 
ury for its wise effectuation, the policy of the depart- 
ment so intimately touches at every point the most 
sensitive business interests of the country, the Secretary 
of the Treasury has so often to determine questions 
which really fix a financial programme on the govern- 
ment, that it is always hazardous to put any man at the 
head of the Treasury who does not possess tested po- 
litical judgment as well as approved business capacity. 
The appointment of Mr. Carlisle is a better appoint- 
ment than that of Mr. Manning was, wise and efficient 
an officer as Mr. Manning proved himself to be. Mr. 
Manning was no statesman, as Mr. Carlisle is. ‘The 
two appointments illustrate in their contrast the devel- 
opment of Mr. Cleveland himself. When he first be- 
came President he had no determinate or constructive 
views with regard to the general policy of the govern- 
ment, but came in to perform a purpose of the execu- 
tive rather than for the legislative branch of the goy- 
ernment; to reform the civil service, not to preside over 
a party programme. Now, on the contrary, he is con- 
scious of a wider mission. His views broadened to the 
whole extent of his function as President during his 
first term of office; the interval of four years during 
which he has been out of official place has strengthened 
and particularized those views. He began by regarding 
the Treasury Department as a business branch of the 
service, like the post office; he now regards it as pos- 
sessing a presidential function in respect of the general 
financial policy of the country. 

Mr. Herbert has long had a very important part in 
administering the Navy Department. No one has had 
a more influential share than he in the legislation by 
which Congress has of late years sought to build up the 
navy into real effectiveness; and as chairman of the 
Committee on Naval Affairs in the House of Repre- 
sentatives of the Congress which has just expired he 
has been, as it were, the legislative representative and 


COLLEGE AND STATE 207 


head of the Navy Department—a sort of American 
parliamentary secretary. He will now manage the De- 
partment from the inside instead of from the outside, 
that is all. His success in Congress has been marked, 
but it has been so quietly achieved that the country at 
large has hardly heard of it. Except that the public 
eye has not much noted him, he has won a cabinet place 
quite after the English fashion, by a steady course of 
eminently useful parliamentary service. He has come 
forward by that process of self-selection which is the 
most stimulating and significant feature of free institu- 
tions under parliamentary forms of government. 
Previous Secretaries of the Navy, being obvious heads 
of the Department, have gotten the credit for many 
things planned, proposed and accomplished by Mr. 
Herbert. He is now Secretary of the Navy himself, 
and may realize both his plans and the reputation which 
those plans ought to bring him. 

But there is something else about Mr. Herbert which 
is even more interesting. He is not only a Southerner, 
but served with distinction in the Confederate army, 
and now he is put at the head of one of the war depart- 
ments of the federal government, having been confirmed 
by the Senate, apparently without a dissenting voice: 
for it took the Senate only fifteen minutes to confirm the 
whole list of cabinet appointments of March 6. Mr. 
Lamar, of Mr. Cleveland’s former cabinet, had also 
espoused and served the cause of the Southern Confed- 
eracy, and he became Secretary of the Interior and a 
Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. But 
here is a man who fought against the Union; who has 
already spent many years in assisting to build up the 
warlike strength of the very government he resisted; 
and who is now made one of the war ministers of that 
government! Who can regard such facts without won- 
der and pride? Such is the healing and amalgamating 
force of fair fight, and of the sovereign determinations 
of policy under free institutions! The war is indeed a 


208 COLLEGE AND STATE 


long way behind us—and yet these men are of the very 
generation that fought it! 

The other appointments may be dismissed with much 
briefer comment—must be so dismissed, in fact, for we 
know too little of the men to make the commentary 
long. ‘The selection of Mr. Richard Olney, of Massa- 
chusetts, for the office of Attorney-General may safely 
be pronounced excellent. No lawyer who knows him 
doubts that Mr. Olney stands at the front of his pro- 
fession, not by arrogation, but by merit. Certainly the 
Department of Justice is the least political of the De- 
partments. It is of little consequence whether the 
Attorney-General have the training and experience of 
a statesman or not. MHis functions, outside the cabinet 
meetings, demand, not a knowledge of public affairs, but 
a knowledge of the laws and a judicial fairness of mind 
in applying them to the law business of the government, 
and it cannot be reckoned unjust to Mr. Garland to 
say that Mr. Cleveland has made a better selection this 
time for this important office than he made eight years 
ago. Mr. Garland was a shade or two too much of a 
politician for that particular post. Mr. Olney, it may 
be taken for granted, has no entangling alliances by 
which to be embarrassed. 

So far as we know anything about Mr. Morton, the 
new Secretary of Agriculture, his selection, too, seems 
a very happy one. There were no precedents to fol- 
low in filling this ofice—for even Mr. Rusk is hardly 
venerable enough to be a precedent—and Mr. Morton 
seems unquestionably a representative man for the post 
in the best sense of the term. A pioneer and yet a stu- 
dent, it is said; a man of hard sinew and acquainted with 
all weathers, with all moods of mother earth, he has 
yet taken time to think and act upon public questions; 
a good farmer whose mind has developed much beyond 
the limits of his farm, he ought not to find it difficult to 
be an excellent officer in the position of advice which 
he now occupies. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 209 


The other three men of the cabinet the public has 
been inclined to regard as curiosities in the line of 
cabinet appointment. Two of them Mr. Cleveland had 
long known and had doubtless sufficiently tested. Mr. 
Lamont was his private secretary during his first admin- 
istration, and Mr. Bissell was his law partner twelve or 
thirteen years ago. Very sagacious politicians have 
known and trusted Mr. Lamont. He stood close in 
Mr. Tilden’s confidence; he earned great favor as editor 
of a political newspaper; Mr. Whitney, whose political 
talents every one now dofis his hat to, recognized the 
same ability, the same worthiness of confidence in him. 
There can be no reasonable doubt about his ability to 
administer the War Department with success, as there 
would have been little doubt about his ability to occupy 
almost any other high administrative post with credit 
and efficiency. ‘The only criticism which his appoint- 
ment prompts is, that he was, so far as we are able to 
ascertain, no more fitted for the War Department than 
for any other. He is, in short, simply a very capable 
‘man of unusual executive talents. He has had no spe- 
cial training to be war minister. 

The management of the Post Office Department is 
not very like ‘chamber practice,” and Mr. Bissell has 
never been anything but a lawyer; but the law is not 
now a learned profession, though there are still men of 
eminent learning in it. Lawyers, nowadays, in the great 
cities at any rate, are simply experts in a technical 
business. Mr. Bissell is doubtless such an expert. ‘The 
conduct of the Post Office Department is also a technical 
business; no doubt Mr. Bissell can learn all that it is 
necessary for the Postmaster General to know readily 
enough. The trusted counsel of the Lehigh Valley Rail- 
road must of course have a head for business. 

But what is one to say of the appointment of Mr. 
Hoke Smith? In selecting him Mr. Cleveland de- 
pended, not upon his own judgment, but upon the judg- 
ment of others; and upon the advice of others he has 


210 COLLEGE AND STATE 


entrusted him with some of the most delicate and im- 
portant interests of the Administration. ‘This is the 
fact that places Mr. Smith’s appointment in sharp con- 
trast with all the others—neither the country nor Mr. 
Cleveland knew him when he was selected. There is 
no Department, unless it be the Treasury, whose mis- 
takes can so easily or so quickly discredit the Adminis- 
tration as the mistakes of the Interior Department can. 
Mr. Cleveland last time appointed to this difficult office, 
with its nice test of character and judgment, a man of 
the highest attainments both as a public servant and as 
a student of institutions, the scholarly, earnest, enviably 
honored L. Q. C. Lamar. Mr. Lamar had no quick 
executive capacity; his habit fitted him for contempla- 
tion rather than for action; he was doubtless better 
suited for the place he subsequently took on the Supreme 
bench than for service in one of the most complex and 
exacting of the administrative Departments. He made 
frequent mistakes in his minor appointments, and, see- 
ing his own errors of judgment in such matters, often 
found it hard to make up his mind to sign any com- 
missions at all. But the making of appointments, im- 
portant matter as it is for the proper administration of 
the government, is not the whole duty of the Interior; 
and Mr. Lamar had that chastened and judicial cast of 
mind which the intensely and wholly practical man 
knows nothing of, and was the better fitted on that 
account for the dispassionate determination of delicate 
questions of policy which rest upon considerations of 
justice, but which the practical man might have 
regarded as based wholly upon considerations of 
expediency. 

Expediency is a short-sighted counsellor; and yet 
Mr. Smith’s training has been such as disposes a man 
habitually to resort to her for counsel. His intellectual 
discipline has been intensely practical and upon a very 
narrow field of practice. Leaving college while still a 
boy, he went immediately to the bar, with only such an 


COLLEGE AND STATE 211 


acquaintance with the principles of law as would enable 
him to pass the easy examination for license. Once 
admitted to practice, he made an eager, astute, unre- 
mitting, successful effort to get business. He prepared 
his cases diligently, became known by the number of 
cases he got and the number he won; devoted himself 
particularly to what one may call anti-corporation law, 
representing anybody, and presently everybody, that 
had a grievance against any railway especially, and 
finally grew to be so considerable a corporation lawyer 
that, just before he discovered himself to Mr. Cleve- 
land’s friends, he had begun to be employed by corpora- 
tions. He had added meanwhile, of course, immensely 
to his knowledge of the law on its case side, to his ability 
to make his large figure and his flexible voice, his famil- 
iarity with the facts of the case, and particularly with 
the weak points of his opponent’s position, tell upon the 
minds of the jury and the opinions of the court. It isa 
familiar story at the American bar; Mr. Smith’s version 
of it is simply on a somewhat bigger scale than usual. 
Such men very often make very efficient and sometimes 
very useful practitioners. But they seldom make more. 
Their training is narrow, their apprehension special- 
ized; their conceptions of justice are technical, their 
standards of policy too self-regardful. If they broaden, 
when opportunity is offered, to the scale of judgment 
required by more liberal functions, it is because of 
qualities which have lain latent in them, not because of 
qualities already developed in them by experience. ‘The 
Department of the Interior will make a heavy drain 
upon Mr. Smith’s latent qualities. If he turns out to 
have none, Mr. Cleveland will have to carry the heavy 
responsibilities of the Department for himself. 

Taken altogether, this is certainly a very unconven- 
tional cabinet. Mr. Harrison’s was made up much more 
after the conventional manner. His appointments were 
many of them open to very grave criticism, but they 
represented an attempt, made after the fashion set by 


212 COLLEGE AND STATE 


previous Presidents, to bring the different elements of 
the party together into the council of the Administra- 
tion. Until Mr. Cleveland, it may be said to have been 
habitual with our Presidents to regard the cabinet as a 
council of party leaders. Mr. Arthur, for example, 
unquestionably averted premature party calamity by 
putting aside his personal preferences in the choice of 
his cabinet and broadening its membership much beyond 
the ranks of the stalwart wing, to which he himself be- 
longed. Other Presidents have followed a like course 
of conciliation and codperation. Only men like Jackson 
have hitherto put their personal preferences foremost 
in supplying the Departments with heads and themselves 
with assistants. 

In this case Mr. Cleveland has combined the two 
methods in a way which may turn out to have been sig- 
nificant of the future course of the Government under 
him. If he had put a man of real party consequence and 
of some political capacity of which we could be sure at 
the head of the Interior Department, instead of Mr. 
Hoke Smith, this would be plain enough to be taken for 
granted. The public questions which now press for 
solution lie within the fields of the Treasury and of 
the Interior. The policy already finely begun, which 
needs to be carefully and intelligently completed, lies 
with the Navy Department; it is the construction of an 
eficient modern navy. ‘The immediate questions of the 
time affect the tariff, the coinage, the policy of the goy- 
ernment with regard to its public lands, the administra- 
tion of the Pension Bureau, and the realization of the 
purposes of our later legislation in respect to the settle- 
ment and civilization of the Indians. Mr. Carlisle can 
be counted on for sound and reasoned purposes con- 
cerning the tariff and the coinage; Mr. Herbert, we may 
be sure, will carry forward the plans for the navy; it 
may be that Mr. Smith will do what he is directed to do 
in the Department of the Interior. Let us hope that 
such will be the arrangement, for fear of miscarriages. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 213 


If he were a man like Mr. Carlisle, it would seem clear 
enough that this Administration was prepared to play 
the difficult, but now imperative, part of guiding legis- 
lation: that a tariff bill and an explicit coinage policy 
might be expected to emanate from the Treasury De- 
partment, with distinct suggestions of the course to be 
pursued from each of the departments likely to be 
affected by legislation. As it is, we are left to surmises, 
for all the Administration is so strong and so truly rep- 
resentative in one or two departments. What will Mr. 
Cleveland do with this cabinet? for nothing can be 
clearer than that he purposes to do something. Will 
the Treasury submit a programme of reform? Will 
the Administration assume the leadership in revising the 
tariff laws, reforming the coinage, extending the pro- 
visions of the civil service law, as Mr. Whitney did in 
developing the navy? Is this a legislative as well as an 
administrative cabinet? Is it a cabinet with purposes as 
well as with capabilities? If so, how does Mr. Cleve- 
land stand for strength in such courses, with a cabinet 
constituted as this one is, not as a party counsel, but 
rather as a body of personal counsellors? Is it strong 
enough for leadership, or is Mr. Cleveland relying 
entirely on his own strength to carry his purposes to 
successful completion? 

Probably he is depending upon himself, taking his 
cue from the country, which undoubtedly depends upon 
him to exercise an active guidance in affairs for the next 
four years. If so, it is a fine display of courage and 
resolution. It commits the country, it must be said, 
in a hazardous degree, to the understanding and capac- 
ity of a single man; but it will, at any rate, make capital 
test of our idea that the President, constitutionally 
viewed, constitutes the Executive Department of the 
government: that he is, not simply the directing head, 
but the efficient embodiment of the administrative func- 
tion. 

For, after all, one cannot avoid, if he would, putting 


214 COLLEGE AND STATE 


general questions with regard to the character of the 
government at a time when appointments are being 
made to its chief administrative offices. Much as they 
are irritated by the appointment of irregular party men 
like Judge Gresham, and unknown party men like Mr. 
Bissell and Mr. Smith, the politicians fall back with res- 
ignation upon the consideration that “it is Mr. Cleve- 
land’s cabinet, and its make-up, after all, nobody’s busi- 
ness but Mr. Cleveland’s.” ‘This is the view which Mr. 
Cleveland himself apparently takes—not arrogantly, but 
with a grave sense of responsibility for the manner in 
which the executive business of the country is to be car- 
ried on. It may be called the literally constitutional 
view of the cabinet. The Constitution vests the execu- 
tive power of the government in the President in per- 
fectly plain terms. It takes it for granted in an occa- 
sional phrase that there will be ‘‘heads of departments,” 
and it authorizes Congress to place the appointment of 
the minor officers of the government in the hands of 
such principal officials. But it offers no hint that they are 
to be more than heads of departments; they receive no 
cue from it to speak as if they had legal share in the 
exercise of executive power. Statute, indeed, may give 
them a certain degree of independence of the President. 
The statute which erected the Treasury Department, for 
example, gave Andrew Jackson no little trouble because 
it rendered it necessary for him to obtain the assent of 
the Secretary to the withdrawal of the deposits of the 
government from the Bank of the United States. He 
had to make two removals before he found a pliant Sec- 
retary. But such statutes must be acknowledged to 
strain the tenor of the Constitution. The President may 
make what selections he will in providing the administra- 
tive departments with their chief officers, and keep indis- 
putably within his literal constitutional powers. ‘The 
Senate must, indeed, confirm his appointments; but it 
has long regarded its function in this respect, not as a 
right to assist or dictate to the President in his choice 


COLLEGE AND STATE 215 


of .cabinet officials, but merely as a check upon the 
nomination of men touched in some degree by scandal 
or known in some way to have shown gross incompetency 
for assuming public trusts. No man who has followed 
Mr. Cleveland’s career ought to have the slightest dis- 
position to curtail his freedom of choice, or can have 
sufficient reason for distrusting his judgment of men, 
and his strength to bear the whole executive responsi- 
bility of the government 

But no President dominates more than eight years 
of our national life. Whatever his individual talents, 
he is only one in a long line of chief magistrates. He 
does not make his own Administration merely: he gives 
a precedent to his successors, who may not have like 
ability and discretion. He contributes an example to the 
general development; he determines a section of the 
general institutional growth of the country. He is re- 
sponsible, not only to the Constitution, which, besides 
being a legal document, is also a vehicle of life, but also 
to the general sense of the country regarding its insti- 
tutions. We possess the right not merely, but must feel 
the duty also, of friendly criticism. We must take care 
to know very clearly what sort of a development we are 
having. 

What kind of a government are we to have? Are 
we to have a purely administrative cabinet, and individ- 
ual choice of policy by the President; or are we to have 
responsible party government, parties being made re- 
sponsible not only for the choice they make of Presi- 
dents, but also for the character and motives of the 
men they bring forward to give him counsel? ‘The 
choice between these two methods is a fundamental one . 
in the constitution of government. Either system would 
be constitutional under the existing provisions of our 
fundamental law; the former literally constitutional, 
the latter within the permissions of the Constitution, 
The practice of our Presidents, too, whenever at least 
they have not been mere military chiefs like Jackson and 


216 COLLEGE AND STATE 


Grant, with imperative preferences of their own, has 
been in the direction of the latter system, until Mr. 
Cleveland, a man as truly taken from outside the regular 
lines of civil promotion as either Grant or Jackson. He 
has broken more than most Presidents with what I 
may call the historical method of appointment. ‘That 
method has unquestionably regarded the cabinet as a 
party council. Mr. Carlisle is the only Democratic 
leader Mr. Cleveland has put into his cabinet. Eminent 
and admirable as the services of Mr. Herbert have 
been, they have been restricted in their field, and they 
have been inconspicuous outside Congress. He has 
shaped legislation, and he goes into the cabinet equipped 
as few men could be for the duties of the particular 
Department to which he has been assigned. But we 
do not know in what degree he may be qualified for gen- 
eral political counsel when sitting with his colleagues. 
He is in no broad sense a leader of his party. 

Very few thoughtful men, I suppose, would main- 
tain that Mr. Cleveland should have put some repre- 
sentative of the stalwart wing of his party among his 
advisers. All who cherish liberal views of reform must 
hope that the future of the party is in the hands of its 
other, its newer elements and must rejoice that the 
President has made up his body of counsellors from 
those sections of the party which seem, so far as we 
know the new men, to be represented. But with the 
conspicuous exception already mentioned, he has chosen 
from the rank and file of that division of his following, 
and not from among leaders at all. Mr. Josiah Quincy, 
the First Assistant Secretary of State, is a Democratic 
leader in the best sense of the term, and a very influen- 
tial and important one, who has constantly, of recent 
months, been at Mr. Cleveland’s elbow; but Mr. Gresh- 
am, his chief, of course is not. He was a leader the 
other day of the liberal wing of the other party; now, 
if he is to be classified at all, he is an independent. He 
carries great weight with those who, like himself, are 


COLLEGE AND STATE 217 


becoming Democrats in the Northwest. He leads in 
opinion among those whose party ties are loose or loos- 
ening—leads very honorably, very ably, and with an 
enviable distinction—but he does not yet, at any rate, 
lead either a party or the section of a party. If he leads 
a section of a party it is a section of the party which 
has hitherto been opposed to Mr. Cleveland. Mr. 
Lamont has taken confidential part in the counsels of 
leaders, but he is not himself a leader. Mr. Morton 
has been prominent among Democratic campaign speak- 
ers in Nebraska, and has had such functions of leader- 
ship as force of character and of conviction give when 
publicly displayed; but there has of course been no place 
of national leadership hitherto for Nebraska Demo- 
crats. Messrs. Olney, Bissell and Smith have been quiet 
lawyers, leading only as men of local prominence must 
always lead when they hold and express pronounced 
views upon party questions. Mr. Cleveland’s first cab- 
inet was much more of the historical pattern than this 
one. It was in some sense a group of leaders. 

It is not often enough noted that we have really never 
answered for ourselves clearly and with definite pur- 
pose the question, What is the Cabinet? Is it the Presi- 
dent’s cabinet, or are the heads of the executive depart- 
ments meant by the spirit of our national institutions to 
be real party colleagues of the President, in council, 
chosen by him, indeed, but from among men of accred- 
ited political capacity, not from among the general body 
of the citizenship of the country? It is a question funda- 
mental to our whole political development, and it is by 
no means to be answered from out the text of the Con- 
stitution simply. That Constitution is a vehicle of life. 
Its chief virtue is, that it is not too rigidly conceived. It 
leaves our life free to take its own courses of well-con- 
sidered custom, its own chosen turns of development. 
Presidents who are themselves of the stuff out of which 
real party leaders are made—men like Jackson and Lin- 
coln and Cleveland—will of course dominate their cab- 


218 COLLEGE AND STATE 


inets, no matter what the principle of appointment; but 
headstrong men like Andrew Johnson will rule only to 
ruin; will goad parties into extreme and ill-considered 
courses by the sheer exasperations of their obstinacy; 
and men who are not by natural constitution equipped 
for leadership will only make the more conspicuous, it 
may be the more disastrous, failures by seeking, in the 
choice of their advisers, to play a role beyond their 
talents. Our party leaders we can choose slowly, by the 
conservative processes of the survival of the fittest in 
Congress, by the exacting tests of command over public 
opinion. Our Presidents, experience has taught us, we 
must often choose hastily, by the unpremeditated com- 
promises or the sudden impulses of huge popular con- 
ventions. 

It is impossible, moreover, that the President should 
really decide all the issues of choice which come to the 
several executive departments. ‘There are only twenty- 
fours hours in the day for him, as for other men, 
and some of these he must, I suppose, devote to sleep. 
The departments are not executive bureaus merely: 
their chief officers are much more than a superior 
sort of secretaries to the President. ‘Their functions 
are political, outside the cabinet as well as within it. 
They must decide many questions which bear directly 
upon the general policy of the Administration, as well 
as innumerable questions of routine detail, and must 
decide them independently of their colleagues and the 
President. It is only concerning the largest, broadest, 
most general matters of policy that they can consult the 
judgment of the cabinet as a whole, or the wishes of the 
President. ‘The presidency is thus inevitably put, as it 
were, into the hands of a sort of commission, of which 
the President is only the directing head. 

Not only so, but, inasmuch as, whether we wish it 
or not, the President is necessarily a party leader, ex 
officio, there ought to be some regular, open, responsible 
connection established between him and his party. He 


COLLEGE AND STATE 219 


is not always, as we know, a real leader before he is 
chosen to his great office of leadership. It has several 
times happened that he was not even personally ac- 
quainted with the men by whom the policy of his party 
had been habitually determined before he was discovered 
by a popular convention. Once and again a President 
has come to Washington ignorant both of men and of 
measures. How is he to make the acquaintance of his 
party; how are they to learn his character and inten- 
tions? He must somehow get the confidence of the men 
in whom the party habitually places confidence and 
whom it will follow, or else he must consent to be quite 
impotent during his four years in everything but the 
mere routine of executive action. 

I go a step further. It is necessary that the mem- 
bers of the cabinet should be recognized party leaders, 
not only because the President’s day is as short as other 
men’s, and many important and far-reaching decisions 
of policy must be left to them, but also because the liter- 
ally constitutional position of the President, as an abso- 
lutely separate, self-sufficient part of the government, 
is a practically impossible position. No government 
can be administered with the highest efficiency unless 
there be close codperation and an intimate mutual 
understanding between its Administration and its legis- 
lature. The real and conclusive test of excellency for 
all laws is their workability, and no legislature can in- 
telligently apply that test unless it be in constant corre- 
spondence with the administrative branch of the govern- 
ment. Legislative proposals, too, are usually more apt 
to be well considered, feasible, business-like, when they 
come from the Administration, which is immediately in 
the presence of the practical conditions under which 
they must be carried out, in the presence, too, of the 
practical difficulties which create the need for such legis- 
lation than when it comes from committees of the 
Houses themselves, committees which cannot codperate 
for the construction of a consistent policy, and which 


220 COLLEGE AND STATE 


are not sobered by the knowledge that they will be 
obliged to find practicable ways of putting their schemes 
into actual execution. | 

This is the argument, to which the country is becom- 
ing more and more inclined to listen, for the introduc- 
tion of the members of the cabinet into the Houses: 
the argument for making it their duty to be present in 
Congress to give information and offer advice, their 
“privilege to propose measures and take part in debate. 
Ours is the only country in the world of any consequence 
which does not in some direct way facilitate codperation 
between its executive and its legislature; and it is only 
because unbounded material prosperity and unprece- 
dented freedom from social disorder and discontent have 
made it easy to conduct our government, despite its dis- 
integrated structure, that we have not yet become con- 
scious of the pinch of disadvantage which must sooner 
or later result from the singular division of our govern- 
ment into groups of public servants looking askance at 
one another. 

Sooner or later we must recognize in the cabinet the 
President’s responsible party council, and must require 
our Presidents, not by hard and fast constitutional pro- 
vision, but by the more flexible while equally imperative 
mandates of public opinion, operating through the me- 
dium of the Senate, to call to the chief places in the 
departments representative party men who have accred- 
ited themselves for such functions by long and honor- 
able public service. We cannot be forever running the 
risks involved in the elevation of unknown men to the 
presidency. The present posture of affairs is altogether 
exceptional, and Mr. Cleveland is an altogether excep- 
tional man, a real leader, but a leader created by cir- 
cumstances which can hardly soon recur. We do not 
know many of the men who are in his cabinet because 
we do not yet know the new Democratic party which is 
now in process of formation. ‘The men in that cabinet 
whom we do know we know as leaders in things which 


COLLEGE AND STATE 221 


are the vital and operative causes of that re-formation. 
The financial policy of the country is to be reformed; 
its new naval strength is to give us proper dignity and 
proper assurance of safety among the nations; the re- 
form of the civil service is to be carried forward on the 
lines now, it is to be hoped, definitely established; the 
executive departments are to be conducted on business 
principles, with a view to making them as economical 
and as efficient as possible. New men have come to the 
front for the accomplishment of the new tasks; new 
regions of the country are turning toward the new party. 
Parties, whether they retain old names or not, are mak- 
ing ready for the new start which the rise of new inter- 
ests has now for some time been commanding. The 
politics of the war time are to be forgotten, even by 
select men of the very generation which engaged in the 
stupendous struggle, and convictions made up, not of 
reminiscence, but of firm purpose for the future devel- 
opment of the country along normal lines of growth, 
are to be the controlling forces of politics, which shall 
come in with a new generation which lives for the future, 
not in the past. We like this cabinet well enough until 
the new movement shall have shown us who the real 
leaders are. Then parties must choose the men who 
really lead them for Presidents, and Presidents thus 
chosen must give us responsible party government by 
surrounding themselves with a cabinet council made up 
from among party men whom the people have known 
and have shown themselves disposed to trust. 

The degree of separation now maintained between the 
executive and legislative branches of our government 
cannot long be preserved without very serious inconven- 
ience resulting. Congress and the President now treat 
with one another almost like separate governments, so 
jealous is each of its prerogatives. “The Houses find out 
only piecemeal and with difficulty what is going on at 
the other end of the avenue, in bureaus which have been 
created by statute. Members have been known to grow 


222 COLLEGE AND STATE 


uneasy, ‘and even indignant, if cabinet officers followed 
the debates from the galleries. Congress, consequently, 
often gropes very helplessly for lack of guidance which 
might be had almost for the asking, while the tasks of 
the departments languish or miscarry for lack of appre- 
ciative codperation and support on the part of Con- 
gress. We risk every degree of friction and disharmony 
rather than hazard the independence of branches of the 
government which are helpless without each other. 
What we need is harmonious, consistent, responsible 
party government, instead of a wide dispersion of func- 
tion and responsibility; and we can get it only by con- 
necting the President as closely as may be with his party 
in Congress. The natural connecting link is the cabinet. 


SHOULD AN ANTECEDENT LIBERAL EDU- 
CATION BE REQUIRED OF STUDENTS 
IN LAW, MEDICINE AND 
THEOLOGY? 


WORLD’S FAIR, CHICAGO, 1893. INTERNATIONAL CON- 
GRESS OF EDUCATION. WILSON’S ANSWER TO THE 
QUERY, DELIVERED JULY 26, 1893. FROM THE 
‘““PROCEEDINGS”’ OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS 
OF EDUCATION OF THE WORLD’S COLUMBIAN EX- 
POSITION, NEW YORK, 1894, PP. I12-I17. 


E shall, I think, escape entanglements if we 

note at the very outset the twofold aspect of the 
subject. It may be discussed (1) from the point of 
view of the individual who is seeking professional in- 
struction as a means of gaining a livelihood, or (2) 
from the point of view of society itself, which must wish 
to be well served by its professional classes. The com- 
munity will doubtless be inclined to demand more edu- 
cation than the individual will be willing to tarry for 
before entering on the practice of his profession. To 
which shall we give greater weight, the self-interest 
of the individual or the self-interest of the community? 
The community, if it be wise, will be anxious to see 
practical knowledge advanced all along the line: will 
wish the physician to be something more than an em- 
piric, capable himself of sure-footed search for the 
origins and determining conditions of disease; will de- 
sire to find in the preacher something larger and more 
generous in temper and endowment than dogmatism— 
even the liberal spirit of a serious and withal practical 
philosophy; will look for dignified parts of learning 
in the lawyer, something better than practical shrewd- 

223 


224 COLLEGE AND STATE 


ness and successful chicane, a capacity to rise at need 
to the point of view of the jurist, as if aware of the 
great and permanent principles of large-eyed justice. 
The average individual, on the other hand, will be eager 
to make his way as rapidly as possible to business; and 
when once business engagements begin to press upon 
him, his thought will adjust itself to them. If the habit 
of carrying special cases up into the region of general 
principles—where alone the real light of discovery 
burns—be not formed during the period of preparation, 
it will hardly come afterward, when the special cases 
crowd fast and the general principles remain remote. 
Only the pastor has any leisure then for the higher sort 
of study, and even he is not likely to begin it then if he 
has never known before what it is and what it may do 
for him. ‘The old women, and the young, will prevent 
his becoming studious if he be not already a confirmed 
student, safe in ‘‘his pensive citadel.” 

An antecedent liberal education, it must of course 
be admitted, does not necessarily disclose general prin- 
ciples; is too often so i/liberal in its survey of subjects 
as to leave upon the mind no trace of the generalizing 
habit. But usually it is liberal, at any rate, in being 
general; and, without a survey of the field of knowl- 
edge, a various view of the interests of the mind, it is 
hard to see how a man is to discern the relations of 
things, upon the perception of which all just thought 
must rest. It is something simply to have traversed 
many fields of thought, to have seen where they lie, 
and how surrounded, with what coasts, what natural, 
what ‘“‘scientific’ boundaries. It is something to have 
made ‘‘the grand tour,” even under indifferent tutors; 
something to have had a Wanderjahr, if only to see the 
world of men and things. A man who has not had 
an antecedent liberal education can certainly never get 
a subsequent equivalent; and, without it, he must re- 
main shut in by a narrow horizon, imagining the con- 
fines of knowledge to lie very close about him on every 


COLLEGE AND STATE 225 


side. Such is the “practical” physician, lawyer, or 
preacher who now rides us like the Old Man of the 
Sea, monarch of his little isle of expert knowledge until 
we can drug and dislodge him. 

The world woke once, in that notable fifteenth cen- 
tury, to find itself standing in the clear dawn of the 
New Learning, and the light which then came has never 
since been taken away. But we have played tricks with 
it; we have defracted it, distinguishing the lines of its 
spectrum with an extreme nicety exceeding that of the 
Rowland grating, and so have brought upon ourselves 
a New Ignorance. In our desire to differentiate its 
rays we have forgotten to know the sun in its entirety 
—its power to illuminate, to quicken and expand. 
Knowledge has lost its synthesis, and lies with its colors 
torn apart, dissolved. That New Learning, which 
saw knowledge whole, shattered the feudal system of 
society; this New Ignorance, which likes knowledge 
piecemeal and in weak solution, has created a feudal sys- 
tem of learning. ‘There is no common mastery, but 
everywhere separate baronies of knowledge, where a 
few strong men rule and many ignorant men are held 
vassals—men ignorant of the freedom of more perfect, 
more liberal knowledge. We need a freer constitution 
of learning. Its present constitution only makes it 
certain that we shall have disorder and wasteful war. 
To come to the matter immediately in hand, see to how 
many subjects the student of medicine must turn if he 
would master his single practical art. It is impossible 
he should understand the physical life of man without 
understanding the physical life of the universe. He 
may not wisely stop short of the widest ranges of 
biology. And yet the physical life of man is made dis- 
tinctive, after all, by his singular mental life. He may 
imagine himself into distemper and disease, and the 
physician will lose trace of causes of great moment to 
his own art if he know nothing of the laws of the mind 
—of physiological psychology not only, but of pure 


226 COLLEGE AND STATE 


psychology too. He cannot get this range of knowl- 
edge in the medical school; he must get it from an ante- 
cedent liberal education; and it will be sheer misfor- 
tune for him, even as a practical man, if that ante- 
cedent training bring him not out upon a plane of 
knowledge, a vantage-ground of outlook and com- 
mand, higher even and more invigorating than these 
special fields of science. The student of theology, it 
will be admitted, is but a poor pretender if no serious 
survey of other subjects precede and accompany his di- 
réct preparation for the ministry. He, of all men, must 
understand mankind if he is to lead them into better 
ways of living and to a death of hope. And how can 
he understand modern society without a knowledge of 
the scientific standards and conceptions that condition 
all modern thought? How can he understand any so- 
ciety without knowing aught of philosophy or politics 
or economy? He will never reach any motive unless 
he learn to read men and their life. 

The student of law, too: what can he know but the 
forms and the tricks of the law if he know nothing of 
the law’s rootage in society, the principles of its origin 
and development; how it springs out of material and 
social conditions which it is the special task of economy 
and political science to elucidate, out of elements which 
run centuries deep into the history of nations? No 
mere technical training can ever make a first-rate law- 
yer. Observe, I do not say jurist—that, of course. I 
say that no first-rate lawyer can be made by merely 
technical training, no lawyer of mastery and real re- 
source. General principles learned memoriter are as 
useless for mastery as precedents learned memoriter. 
No man shall command them who does not know whence 
they came, and what like occasions must be made to 
yield new principles alike to bar and bench. Such is 
the practitioner who is armed cap-a-pie, to be feared by 
every opponent in the mere matter of winning cases. 
How shall a man who knows nothing of history, of eco- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 2217 


nomics, or of political science ever know more than 
the technical rules of the law, which must for him be 
rules dead, inflexible, final? 

All this is plain enough, at least to every liberally 
educated man, and to every one who considers first of 
all the good of the community and the advancement 
of the professions. But immediate self-interest, haste 
to get at the pecuniary rewards of his profession, to 
make a supporting business of it, will make the indi- 
vidual indifferent to these larger considerations. He is 
willing to leave the higher reaches of his calling to 
those who have time to seek them. The physician is 
content to be a successful empiric, and learn useful 
practical lessons from his daily experience. ‘The min- 
ister is satisfied if he please his congregation by agree- 
able sermons and still more agreeable pastoral visits. 
The lawyer does not aspire to be more than an expert 
in a technical business. As many will go without a 
“liberal education” as the community will permit to do 
so. Public opinion does not act imperatively in the 
matter, because not all of the public, at any rate here 
in the United States, has made up its mind that a gen- 
eral training need precede professional training. Some 
communities even seem inclined to boast of their “born” 
preachers, and their lawyers who have gained admis- 
sion to the bar after only six weeks’ study. ‘There is 
among us a somewhat general skepticism as to the efh- 
cacy of college instruction, and a very widely diffused 
belief in the sufficiency of natural endowments. And, 
of course, no one will claim that the colleges give a 
man all, or even any considerable part, of what he 
should have by way of equipment for one of the learned 
professions. All that we can say is that the colleges 
can give him the point of view, the outlook and the 
habit of mind, of the scholar; that, without an “‘ante- 
cedent liberal education,’ not one man in a thousand 
will have the studies he ought to undertake so much as 
suggested to him. His little world will be flat, not 


228 COLLEGE AND STATE 


round, shut in by an encompassing sea, bounded by the 
near horizon. A professional man ought to have a 
liberal education, if only to make him aware of his 
limitations, careful not to blunder into fields of which 
he knows that he is ignorant. 

The practical side of this question is certainly a very 
serious one in this country. That there should be an 
almost absolute freedom of occupation is a belief very 
intimately and tenaciously connected with the demo- 
cratic theory of government, and our legislators are 
very slow to lay many restrictions upon it. Our col- 
leges and universities, and our law and medical and 
theological schools have seldom endowment enough to 
render them independent of popular demands and 
standards. ‘They are wholly independent, however, of 
each other, and cannot be constrained to accept any 
common scheme or standard. Even if the public had 
made up its mind very definitely on this subject, no 
means are at hand to facilitate concerted action. Re- 
form must come piecemeal, and by example: not all at 
once and by authority. ‘The remedy for the present 
state of affairs in this country seems to me to lie in 
resolute independent experiment by individual institu- 
tions. Let leading universities and colleges that have 
or can get money enough to make them free to act with- 
out too much regard to outside criticism, first erect 
professional schools upon a new model of scholarship, 
and then close the doors of those schools to all who have 
not a first-rate college training. It would not take the 
country long to find out that the best practical lawyers 
and doctors and preachers came out from those schools 
—and the rest would be discredited. I believe that no 
medical or law or theological school ought to be a sep- 
arate institution. It ought to be both organically and 
and in situation part of a university, a university big 
and real enough to dominate it. It ought to be per- 
meated with the university atmosphere; it ought to em- 
ploy university methods; it ought itself to exemplify 


COLLEGE AND STATE 229 


the liberal spirit of learning. It would do little good 
to the professions to send only college graduates to 
many of our separate professional schools. They 
would find nothing but empiricism there. To nothing 
there would their college training seem applicable. It 
is useless, too, to try to reform these separate schools 
as they stand. Build a university over them and extend 
the university faculty into them, and they may be made 
to your mind; but do not dream of making them like 
universities in spirit, method, thoroughness in any other 
way. When universities put students trained in chem- 
istry, biology, and psychology into their own medical 
schools; students drilled in history, in economics, in 
philosophy, and in the natural history of society into 
their law schools; students informed in the various 
thought of the age and read in the literature of all ages 
into their schools of theology, the country will begin 
to be filled with real lawyers, capable physicians, power- 
ful preachers once more, and these great professions will 
once again deserve the name of learned professions. 
The separation of general and special training is an 
acute symptom of the disease of specialization by which 
we are now so sorely afflicted. Our professional men 
are lamed and hampered by that partial knowledge 
which is the most dangerous form of ignorance. I would 
no more employ a physician unacquainted with the gen- 
eral field of science than I would employ an oculist who 
was ignorant of the general field of medicine. Knowl- 
edge is trustworthy only when it is balanced and com- 
plete. This is the reason why the whole of the question 
we are now considering is a university question. Knowl- 
edge must be kept together; our professional schools 
must be university schools. Our faculties must make 
knowledge whole. The liberal education that our pro- 
fessional men get must not only be antecedent to their 
technical training; it must also be concurrent with it. 
No more serious mistake was ever made than the di- 
vorce of technical or practical education from theorett- 


230 COLLEGE AND STATE 


cal, as if principles could be made use of and applied 
without being understood. It is, indeed, true that a 
locomotive driver may handle his engine with dexterity 
and safety without being either a machinist or an 
engineer, but the body of knowledge of which the phy- 
sician or the lawyer or the preacher makes practical ap- 
plication is no machine. It is a body of thought; it does 
not stand alone; it is not even true except in its proper 
relations to other thought. To handle it requires not 
only skill, but insight also—a trained perception of rela- 
tive values, a quick capacity for sifting and assessing 
evidence. As liberal an education as possible is needed 
for such functions, if only to open the eyes and accus- 
tom the faculties to a nice manipulation of thought. 
The empiric is the natural enemy of society, and it is 
imperative -that everything should be done—everything 
risked—to get rid of him. Nothing sobers and reforms 
him like a (genuine) liberal education. 


DISCUSSION. 


PRESIDENT GILMAN said: I want to speak of one phase in this 
matter, that of medical education, because my attention has been 
particularly called to it. Everybody knows that a medical man 
ought to be well grounded in everything that pertains to biology, let 
us say. Now there is a school of medicine to be started in Balti- 
more. We have started on the principle that nobody shall be ad- 
mitted to it except those who are liberally educated. “That seems 
very simple; but how are we going to find out who are liberally 
educated? You say the holders of the Bachelor of Arts degree. 
But on coming to scrutinize a little more closely, we find a great 
many young men graduate from colleges, and, although they have 
diplomas, they come from institutions which have not the elements 
of good education in them. Then, again, we find this difficulty, that 
many of these institutions which give bachelorate degrees already pro- 
vide some instruction in physics, in chemistry, in botany, in zodlogy, 
and physiology, each of which ought to have its own place in a 
finished medical course. How shall this difficulty be adjusted? Let 
us say, then, it shall be those who have taken a bachelorate degree, 
provided their bachelorate degree includes those items. I expect the 
result will be that a smaller number of scholars will come, and the 


COLLEGE AND STATE 23% 


question is whether we shall be strong enough to stand it. That is 
the difficulty in this whole problem. Generally speaking, the more 
that is done to require an education equivalent to that given by an 
ordinarily good college giving the bachelor’s degree, as antecedent 
to the study of law, medicine, and theology, the better it will be 
for the country. 

Mr. Dewey thought it would be unwise to forbid men by legis- 
lation to practice law or medicine without an antecedent college edu- 
cation, but that a public feeling against professional men devoid of a 
liberal education could be created by proper stimulation. A help 
against the admission of really uneducated students to professional 
schools would be found when the too common system by which the 
pay of the professor is fixed and his salary regulated by the fee, is 
done away with. ‘The taking of fees is a constant temptation to 
admit incompetent students. “Take the fees away and it becomes 
the interest of the professor to shut out incompetent students. Fur- 
thermore, the degree-giving power should not be lodged in detached 
professional schools. 


LEGAL EDUCATION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


ADDRESS BEFORE THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION, 
SARATOGA SPRINGS, AUGUST 23, 1894. TAKEN 
FROM THE “REPORT” OF THE SEVENTEENTH 
ANNUAL MEETING, PP. 439-451, PHILADELPHIA, 


1894. 


DG no time, it must seem to every thoughtful man, 
has the study of the law in a broad and enlightened 
spirit been of more vital importance to society than it is 
at present. For society and its established principles of 
conduct and authority are being subjected nowadays to 
a peculiarly sharp and disturbing scrutiny. Men of 
every calibre and all dispositions have assumed the role 
of critics. Society does not suit one because it has 
loitered too long on the way to perfection. It dis- 
pleases another because it has been all too energetic in 
its mistaken zeal for change. Some censure it because 
it is not altruistic; others, because it has not noted and 
acted upon radical practical changes in modern life. 
On one hand it is condemned for its lack of heart and 
humane feeling; on another, for its lack of practical 
sagacity. It is bidden, in some quarters, to make the 
individual freer, in others to take him more thoroughly 
in hand for his discipline and guidance. Some want the 
State to regulate monopolies, others wish it to assume 
the entire management of them out of hand. Every 
one knows that the relations—even the legal relations 
—now existing between capitalists and laborers are 
seriously amiss, and every one has his own remedy for 
the evil. None of the critics of society stop short with 
censure; each has his reform to propose; each comes 
with the draft of a new law in his hand. There is an 
232 


COLLEGE AND STATE 233 


accumulating clamor for legislation, for changes in the 
law—an almost pathetic faith that new machinery for 
the voter and new rules for the courts will surely bring 
regeneration and progress. ‘The lawyer, meanwhile, is 
everywhere sadly discredited. The world is in search 
of prophets, not barristers. It wants change, not a 
judgment. The lawyer will stickle for form and regu- 
larity, will demand exactness of phrase and certitude of 
provision, workable laws and rules susceptible of being 
consistently and equitably administered. He has puz- 
zling points in his head, too, about the practicability of 
getting at certain vague rights upon which philanthro- 
pists insist. And so reformers shun him and deem his 
counsel disheartening. It must be granted, moreover, 
that they are not without striking instances, drawn out 
of authentic history, of lawyers having acted as very 
stubborn and very stupid obstructionists, and having 
refused to take any part in necessary, nay inevitable, 
changes in the law which they might have moderated 
and shaped to temperate uses had they not resisted them 
and so rendered them the more inapt and extreme. 
The prophets, therefore, go without their counsel and 
lend countenance to the improving of statutes by any 
hopeful man, with or without experience in such critical 
matters, who is of their creed and vision. 

No doubt much of this new ardor for reform is sound 
and just, an earnest of quick health in the social body, 
and a signal of hope. No man among us is so blind as 
not to see that the law limps sadly at many points; that 
it has not at all kept pace with the swift and radical 
changes that have transformed industrial society beyond 
recognition almost within a single generation. I do not 
doubt that the law of contract and association and taxa- 
tion and tenure needs amendment and remodeling. But 
I deprecate the haste, the ignorance, the intemperance, 
the fatuity of many of those who are seeking our suf- 
frages as reformers. I believe that we shall run upon 
irreparable disaster unless we ponder very seriously the 


234. COLLEGE AND STATE 


proper means and practicable measures of reform. I 
feel sure, therefore, that nothing will steady us like a 
body of citizens instructed in the essential nature and 
processes of law and a school of lawyers deeply versed 
in the methods by which the law has grown, the vital 
principles by which, under every system, it has been 
pervaded, its means of serving society and its means of 
guiding it. We need laymen who understand the neces- 
sity for law, and the right uses of it, too well to be 
unduly impatient of its restraints; and lawyers who un- 
derstand the necessity for reform and the safe means 
of affecting it, too well to be unreasonably shy of assist- 
ing it. ‘The worst enemy to the law is the man who 
knows only its technical details and neglects its gene- 
rative principles, and the worst enemy of the lawyer is 
the man who does not comprehend why it is that there 
need be any technical details at all. There is critical 
danger that the law may cease or fail to be a liberal 
profession and lose its guiding place in society accord- 
ingly; and I know of no measure so well calculated to 
deliver us from that danger as the proper establish- 
ment of law studies as a university discipline, no more 
to be confined to technical and professional schools than 
the study of science. Law is a branch of political 
science, and in this day especially we need to insist in 
very plain terms upon its study as such. In the presence 
of many new and strange questions, our courts are puz- 
zled and disconcerted. Called upon to find principles 
of law or procedure for the amazing developments of 
an industrial society which seems constantly to shift and 
change under their very eyes, they either strain old 
analogies and wrest old precedents to strange uses or 
else cut the knot with some sharp remedy which seems 
to damage as many rights as it preserves. We need 
lawyers now, if ever, who have drunk deeper at the 
fountains of the law, much deeper, than the merely 
technical lawyer, who is only an expert in an intricate 
and formal business; lawyers who have explored the 


COLLEGE AND STATE 235 


sources as well as tapped the streams of the law, and 
who can stand in court as advisers as well as pleaders, 
able to suggest the missing principles and assist at the 
adaptation of remedies. Such men we shall get when 
we recognize law as a university study. You must begin 
to make your lawyer, in short, on the other side of the 
law school. There are other reasons, to be sure, for 
teaching undergraduates to understand law. Every 
business man must wish such a training, for his business 
runs everywhere amidst the intricacies of the law. 
Every minister should know as intimately as possible the 
function that law performs in society, for our ministers 
are nowadays our reformers, and they make but a silly 
exhibition of themselves when they talk as if law could 
be recast to-morrow upon the lines of the nearest text. 
Every citizen should know what law is, how it came 
into existence, what relation its form bears to its sub- 
stance, and how it gives to society its fibre and strength 
and poise of frame. But our concern is with the law- 
yer, and it is certainly he more than any other who needs 
to be versed in the philosophy and the history of law. 
In the Law School he cannot get this view of his great 
subject. Time does not serve. Details, niceties, special 
statutes, entangled decisions crowd into the foreground. 
He is too near the mass of the law and too much en- 
gaged with a critical scrutiny and nice discrimination of 
its multifarious parts to take his distance, observe 
whence it came and whither it is tending, what its 
greater proportions are and its commanding principles. 
He must see all this first, and then the details will not 
confuse or mislead him. What the instruction given 
him in college should be, how arranged, how imparted, 
how emphasized, is the important and difficult question. 
One thing is plain: it must be put in its right place 
among his other studies. It must be made evident from 
its position, its method, its outlook, that it is an integral 
portion of political science. In law the principles of 
social relationship—elsewhere in solution, in philan- 


236 COLLEGE AND STATE 


thropy, in social intercourse, in political economy—are 
brought to a sharp crystallization. It is that portion of 
the established social habit which has gained distinct 
and formal recognition in the shape of uniform rules, 
backed by the authority and the power of government, 
and all the influences that move and mould society 
serve to explain and animate and prophesy for law. 
The lawyer should know what these influences are, how 
they are to be recognized and their force reckoned, how 
they are to be dealt with and directed. The man who 
teaches law to undergraduates should be a political 
scientist and—what nowadays we recognize as a dif- 
ferent thing—a sociologist; and I do not hesitate to add 
that the teacher of sociology and political science should 
have a thorough acquaintance with the principles which 
govern the life of law. The statical forces of law 
which hold society steadfast, and the dynamical forces 
of politics and morals and industrial motive, which sub- 
ject it to almost constant change, are not to be separated 
as if they had no casual connections. Austin has done 
us the great disservice of putting his analysis of law into 
such terms as to create the very general impression 
among lawyers who do not think, but swallow formulas, 
that law is somehow made independently of the bulk of 
the community, and that it is their business to accept and 
apply it as it is without troubling themselves to look 
beyond the statute or decision in which it is embodied. 
I do not see how any one can possibly understand the 
law or know anything of it, except memoriter, without 
getting a clear idea of how it is in fact generated in 
society and adapted from age to age to its immediate 
needs and uses. 

For my own part, I have a very clear notion of the 
field which ought to be covered in the undergraduate 
instruction of young men who expect to become lawyers. 
They ought, in the first place, to be taught very care- 
fully the differences between the two great bodies of law- 
which we call public and private. Public law is a thing 


COLLEGE AND STATE 237 


of polity; private law, a product of the essential rela- 
tionship existing between man and man in any society, 
no matter what its political constitution. ‘The student, 
as well as every other citizen, ought to know the nature 
and organization of the government he lives under and 
the principles, whether of liberty or authority, which 
regulate the relations of individuals to the State. But 
the student of the law should go further than the citi- 
zen, and scrutinize those conceptions of jural relation- 
ship which are in a sense independent of polity. He 
should be very carefully grounded in the principles of 
general jursiprudence before he undertakes to master 
any particular system of law. For the time, the explicit 
provisions of particular systems should serve his 
thought simply as illustrations, concrete examples and 
verifications. It is possible—and I need not say how 
desirable—that he should be made familiar with a 
sketch, general, of course, and yet not too general, of 
the history of law; its genesis and form in the childhood 
of States, its development in classical instances in 
antique States, its passage through the strange crucible 
of the middle ages, and the circumstances of its develop- 
ment in the societies of modern Europe. But that is 
not enough. He should not be left with nothing but 
this sketch, which can hardly do more than provoke his 
curiosity upon a hundred and one points left unde- 
veloped. He must be given, besides, two bodies of law 
for his more particular examination, in respect of their 
individual character and the way they came about; one 
a system aged and completed, the other a system of our 
own time and as yet unfinished. ‘The former can be 
none other than the splendid system of Rome, which no 
lawyer can contemplate without emotion or examine 
without instruction; the other, if one had the knowledge 
and the foreign taste, might be the law of France or 
the law of Prussia, but I,should think it ought to be the 
common law of England. We know much less about 
how the common law was begotten and bred and 


238 COLLEGE AND STATE 


brought to maturity than French and German scholars 
know of the derivation and growth of their own sys- 
tems, to our shame be it said; but there is the more 
-reason that we should bestir ourselves to put together 
what we do know, extend it and complete it; and noth- 
ing is quite so stimulating or so instructive to the young 
student as to be present at such a process of investiga- 
tion and take part in it where he can. That is the lesson 
of modern educational methods. 

I need not say, after this survey of the field, that the 
method of instruction should at every step be both his- 
torical and comparative. No other method has the 
slightest claim to be called philosophical. For by the 
philosophy of law I do not mean its metaphysics; I 
mean its rational explanation; and no explanation of 
law can be rational which does not make it clear why 
and how law came into existence, what are the essential 
and what the accidental contrasts and divergences be- 
tween particular systems, and what the principles are 
which everywhere prevail and under whatever circum- 
stances, as if by a sort of radical necessity. And here 
let me pay my compliments in passing to the question 
whether the law, when taught as a profession, should be 
taught by the inductive use of cases or by the deductive 
use of principles already extracted from the cases and 
formulated in texts. The teaching of law as a profes- 
sion should no more be irrational than the teaching of 
it as part of a liberal education or as a preparation for 
law studies. The case method, therefore, falls short 
and is slavish if it stops in each instance with the first 
case ina series. Where did the courts get their principle 
from in the first case, if there was, indeed, neither 
statute nor precedent; and, if there was a statute, what 
guided them to its interior meaning? Such are the 
questions which reveal to the student, when successfully 
answered, the real genesis and significance of law. In 
like manner, the text-book method is neither philo- 
sophical nor really instructive unless the principles 


COLLEGE AND STATE 239 


made use of are challenged, cross-questioned, and made 
to give a rational account of themselves. It is only 
when principle is thus realized as a living and necessary 
thing with as clear a pedigree and explanation as a 
horse or a king, that it can become really a part of the 
lawyer’s thought and judgment and professional equip- 
ment. ‘The first case, of course, came to the judges out 
of a special set of circumstances in the community 
around them, and they were able to decide it because 
they understood the conditions out of which it had 
arisen and knew what those conditions demanded. 
They pluck out the heart of a statute in the same way, 
by understanding what gave rise to its enactment and 
what it is that it is intended to accomplish. ‘The judge, 
after all, if he be of the sort we quote and make a 
veritable authority of, is a seer and a man who might 
have been a statesman or a professor of political 
science! ‘The ‘‘common’’ law we believe to have arisen 
out of custom, out of the life of the people; and have 
not all our writers upon the common law, from astute 
Sir Matthew Hale down to formal Mr. Broom, as- 
sumed that statutes are made but in supplement to it or 
amendment to it, as if it were complete and they excep- 
tional? This is plainly the assumption of the celebrated 
maxims with regard to the interpretation of statutes: 
‘What was the common law before the making of the 
act?’’ ‘What was the mischief and defect against 
which the common law did not provide?’ ‘What 
remedy has the legislature devised and applied?” “The 
true reason of the remedy?” And have you not noted 
the result of this process of intepretation, the new law 
held up to the standard of the old and treated as if it 
were meant, of course, to be fitted into it? Old statutes 
disappear, as it were by digestion, into the general body 
of principles; or, rather, for the process is deliberate, 
they are kneaded into the mass by much pressing and 
handling in the courts, until writers are sorely puzzled 
to distinguish common from statute law. New statutes, 


240 COLLEGE AND STATE 


too, immediately begin to feel and yield to the same 
process. In time they, too, will be so knitted into the 
body of the law by the careful stitches of successive 
generations of judges as to have become fairly indis- 
tinguishable from the material with which they have 
been combined. ‘Through the courts they are being 
played upon and weather-beaten by the practical condi- 
tions of the economic and moral life of the community, 
and so are being steadily moulded by forces which the 
student must afterwards re-examine if he would compre- 
hend and veritably master the law which is their 
product. 

To take a definite example, in order to make my 
meaning clearer, it is a favorite idea of mine that com- 
mercial law should be taught along with the history of 
commerce, which will make it plain what gave rise to 
the relations of business with which the law deals, how 
the forms of commercial negotiation and of commercial 
paper came into existence, and how statutes and all the 
imperative regulations of the law have come after the 
fact, fixing obligations already habitually recognized, 
or at any rate ready to be put into form, and so simply 
serving merchants, not inventing transactions for them. 
One portion of our law we already study in this way— 
the law of real property. It has retained forms and 
phrases which we cannot understand without turning 
back to examine the feudal system and the social condi- 
tions of the middle ages; and so we are happily obliged 
to give heed to its genesis. We ought to do the same 
for every portion of the law. 

I shall not need to argue, after what I have said, that 
the studies I have outlined properly find a place in the 
curriculum of a college. They are liberal studies, not 
technical. I am careful, in my own lecturing, to treat 
such subjects as strictly as possible as a part of political 
science—to exhibit law as an instrument of society, and 
not as the subject-matter of a technical profession. I 
am punctilious to give out as little as may be of such law 


COLLEGE AND STATE 241 


as could be used in court to win a case with. If you say 
that such studies, though no doubt very interesting, and 
even stimulating and enlightening, are only for the man 
who has the time for them; that they are a luxury, and 
are but so much the more added to what the lawyer will 
in any case be obliged to learn, I reply that you are 
mistaken; that such studies, besides being in themselves 
a liberal education, really save time. It saves time to 
become more than a lawyer and be a jurist. You have 
just so much the readier and more various means of 
ascertaining and enforcing the methods and the argu- 
ments by which to win cases, if that is all you want; and 
you will the sooner get the best sort of practice. Mr. 
James Bryce was for twenty-three years professor of 
the civil law at the University of Oxford, taking up the 
office in 1870, and laying it down last year; and during 
all of that time, I believe, he continued in the active 
practice of his profession as a barrister. He says very 
frankly, in his interesting valedictory lecture, that his 
knowledge of Roman law has seldom, if ever, been of 
direct and immediate service to him in his practical law 
business; and he doubts whether any of his pupils has 
ever found occasion to use it in court. But he confi- 
dently expresses the opinion that a student who, out of 
three years devoted to law study, has given one year 
to Roman law and two to English, will, at the end of 
the period, know as much English law as the man who 
has given all three of the years to studying nothing else; 
and he intimates that the student of Roman law will 
know English law more discriminatingly and with an 
easier mastery. That is what I meant by saving time; 
saving subsequent time. ‘The more various the appa- 
ratus of study, the easier the study. And so I believe 
that, by teaching law to undergraduates thus historically 
and comparatively, and as a part of general political 
science, as if it were stuff of society, with a wealth of 
instructive experience wrapped up in it, a material and 


242 COLLEGE AND STATE 


vehicle of life, I am making, so far as I succeed, not 
only enlightened men, but also successful lawyers. 

I do not hesitate to say, moreover, that in general 
view and method professional instruction in law should 
be of the same kind. Just in proportion as you give, 
along with every principle, its history and its rational 
explanation, just in that proportion do you increase the 
ease and rapidity with which the pupil will master it, 
and the certainty that he will retain and be able to make 
accurate use of it. Of course, professional instruction 
in law must be very different in detail. It must deal 
with the law as a practical science and must expound 
with not a little minuteness the ways in which it is to be 
applied to business and to the changing and infinitely 
various circumstances of all the formal dealings of 
society. It is inevitable, as I have already said, that it 
should be technical, and that its technicalities should 
even crowd the foreground of every exposition. But 
what of the background? what of the light in which all 
these details are to be exhibited, the setting and the 
reasonable order in which they are to be placed? What 
of the accompanying comments and the accompanying 
outlines of development? It is absolutely necessary 
that these countless technical niceties should be given 
their significance, their connection with the principles 
whose servants and attendants they are, and to which 
they should always be obedient. To do this saves time, 
I urge again, as well as makes better, more masterful 
and sure-footed lawyers. A technicality is difficult 
only so long as it is unexplained and has to be kept 
sticking to the memory by external and artificial pres- 
sure. So soon as you explain it you bring out its ad- 
hesive quality and it will not leave you so long as you 
continue to understand it. ‘There’s no glue like com- 
prehension! I have observed that the young American 
very keenly relishes a technicality and makes no diff- 
culty of it at all, if you will but show him how it points 
a principle or sums up an experience. He likes the intel- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 243 


lectual art of navigating a subtlety amidst practical 
difficulties. 

We do not in this country recognize, at any rate in 
any formal manner, the distinction drawn in the old 
country between attorneys and barristers. Our bar- 
risters are their own attorneys, and are in fact very 
much more engaged in most instances in attorney work 
than in the conduct of actual litigation. It is for this 
reason, no doubt, that our law schools have come to 
confine themselves so exclusively to a very technical 
course of training. It is not clearly enough realized, I 
venture to think, however, that this is the case; that we 
devote our instruction to the preparation of attorneys, 
who direct the business of the law and must be technical 
experts, and neglect to provide ourselves, in any syste- 
matic way, with barristers, who handle the principles 
of the law in argument, and who must possess a knowl- 
edge of legal reasoning at once comprehensive and 
flexible. We must not forget, either, that we need 
judges—under our system of government a great many 
—and that we get so many illiberal judgments from our 
courts because we have so many mere attorneys on the 
bench. A barrister, let it be said very frankly, has a 
much higher function than the attorney—as the judge 
has, by common consent, a higher function than either. 
Any exact and painstaking man may make a fairly good 
attorney; but a man who would plead cases must, if he 
would master his part, be a man capable of making law 
for the court—making it, I mean, as courts make it, by 
systematic interpretation. Systematic interpretation is 
the reading together, as the premises for a conclusion, 
of different parts of a body of law. It is driving prece- 
dents into court, not tandem, but abreast, to beat a new 
road and pick the court up to take them into a fresh 
country. It is bringing the thought of a system of law 
to a new focus, and so effecting a new illumination. A 
few men we always have who can do this. They are 
always men who have somehow gotten a wide outlook 


244 COLLEGE AND STATE 


upon men and books; who have given themselves a large 
equipment and diligently multiplied their resources. 
They have not in all cases gotten these things from a 
classroom or the guidance of any teacher. Sometimes 
they have conquered their territory for themselves, un- 
assisted, because they had the instinct of mastery, and 
the courage, and the initiative. But systematic study 
under the right sort of stimulation and suggestion must 
be credited with most such master practitioners, I be- 
lieve. It is worth while considering whether we could 
not deliberately produce them in somewhat greater 
numbers by a partial change in the method and point of 
view of our instruction in the law schools. Many a 
young fellow, not yet awakened or stimulated by a 
liberal course of preparation for professional studies, 
would discover the life and power of the law for himself 
if you would but once make the necessary suggestions 
to his mind, if you would but enable him to see the law 
as a thing full of life and growth, quick with questions 
waiting to be answered out of accessible books and by 
means of study sure to yield tremendous increase of 
forensic power. 

But the best hope is from the colleges. We must 
invite undergraduates to become jurists, and systematic- 
ally show them how it can be done. It is the proper 
function of universities, certainly, to train citizens; and 
while training citizens you can provoke jurists. It is in 
this sense that our young men must be made to become 
lawyers before entering law schools. Our Committee 
on Legal Education, in their admirable report, insist, 
with irresistible show of reason, that we must give over 
devoting our attention so exclusively to the detail of 
highly specialized portions of the law and return to 
the earlier and better method of giving the student, 
first of all, at any rate, and as a foundation for every- 
thing that is to follow, a unified and comprehensive 
view of the law as a whole, displayed and connected as 
a system, its parts shown in their due proportions and 


COLLEGE AND STATE 245 


relations, and its entire body erected for a single view. 
In my opinion, only the codperation of the colleges can 
make this possible. We all remember that Blackstone’s 
Commentaries were first of all what we should call a 
course of college lectures. To view the law as a whole, 
in its philosophy and historical relationships and for the 
purpose of discovering its whole significance is the func- 
tion, not of the professional expert, but of the political 
scientist. “Che means and the spirit for such study must 
be supplied by the universities; the law schools must 
welcome and carry forward their employment. When 
we have universities investigating and teaching law as 
a science, we may ask the law schools to adopt the spirit 
of the universities, and to transmit the results of such 
study while carrying forward their own proper function 
of imparting law as an art. The undergraduate must 
determine what the law student is to be. 


UNIVERSITY TRAINING AND CITIZENSHIP. 


FROM ‘‘THE FORUM,” SEPTEMBER, 1894, VOL. XVIII, 
PP. 107-116. WALTER H. PAGE WAS THEN EDITOR 
OF “THE FORUM.” 


T is hard, amidst a multitude of counsellors, to make 
up our own ideal of what a university should be. We 
have been so often bidden, by young and old alike, to 
make our university instruction like that of Germany, 
that we have more than half consented to try the experi- 
ment. And yet we are by no means sure of our purpose 
in that direction. Once and again we have been made 
to think a good deal about the advantage that a young 
fellow gets from reading widely and systematically with 
a tutor, as the men do at the English universities. We 
like the close contact between teacher and pupil, and 
the rather liberal and unscholastic way of handling 
many books, which such a method of instruction seems 
to secure. ‘The French system, too, we can appreciate 
and wish for when we are in the humour. We like the 
French spirit and sense of form, and we hold our judg- 
ments open to suggestions as to the best way of impart- 
ing vitality of that sort to our own instruction. All 
the while, however, it is our temper to put varied and 
vexatious restrictions on these, as on other, international 
exchanges. here is a very heavy duty on imported 
ideals. It costs us more than they are worth to subject 
them to our customs and get them fairly on the market. 
There is no great demand for them. The young men 
who really want them go abroad, if they can, to get 
them. 
And yet we have no university ideal of our own. We 
are not even sure that we wish to create one. We ask 
246 


COLLEGE AND STATE 247 


ourselves, Do we want universities of a distinctively 
American type? It is the first impulse of most scholarly 
minds to reply with a plain and decided negative. Learn- 
ing is cosmopolitan, and it would seem at first thought 
like stripping learning of its freedom and wide preroga- 
tive to demand that the universities where it makes its 
home should be national. Let the common schools 
smack of the soil, if they must, but not the universities ! 
Must not the higher forms of scholarship follow every- 
where the same method, in the same spirit? May not 
its doctrines constitute always a sort of international 
law of thought? Is it not a kind of freemasonry which 
has everywhere like degrees and a common ceremonial? 
Certainly truth is without geographical boundary, and 
no one could justly wish to observe a national bias in 
the determination of it. 

It must be remembered, however, that scholarship is 
something more than an instrument of abstract investi- 
gation merely. It is also an instrument and means of 
life. Nations, as well as individuals, must seek wisdom: 
the truth that will make them free. There is a learning 
of purpose as well as a learning of science; for there is 
a truth of spirit as well as a truth of fact. And scholar- 
ship, though it must everywhere seek the truth, may 
select the truths it shall search for and emphasize. It 
is this selection that should be national. It is a question 
of emphasis and point of view; not a question of com- 
pleting the circle and sum of knowledge. A wise man 
will choose what to learn; and so also will a wise nation. 
Not all learning, besides, is without a country. All 
physical science is international, so are also all formal 
parts of learning; and all philosophy, too, no doubt, and 
the laws of reasoning. But there is, besides these, a 
learning of purpose, to be found in literature and in the 
study of institutions; and this it is which should be made 
the means of nationalizing universities, being given the 
central and codrdinating place in their courses of in- 
struction. 


248 COLLEGE AND STATE 


In order to be national, a university should have, at 
the centre of all its training, courses of instruction in 
that literature which contains the ideals of its race and 
all the nice proofs and subtle inspirations of the charac- 
ter, spirit, and thought of the nation which it serves; 
and, besides that, instruction in the history and leading 
conceptions of those institutions which have served the 
nation’s energies in the preservation of order and the 
maintenance of just standards of civil virtue and public 
purpose. ‘These should constitute the common train- 
ing of all its students, as the only means of schooling 
their spirits for their common life as citizens. For the 
rest, they might be free to choose what they would 
learn. Being thus prepared for their common life to- 
gether by schooling in the same ideals of life and public 
action, they might the more safely be left to prepare for 
their individual and private functions separately and 
with undisturbed freedom. 

It is the object of learning, not only to satisfy the 
curiosity and perfect the spirits of individual men, but 
also to advance civilization; and, if it be true that each 
nation plays its special part in furthering the common 
advancement, every people should use its universities to 
perfect it in its proper role. A university should be 
an organ of memory for the State for the transmission 
of its best traditions. Every man sent out from a uni- 
versity should be a man of his nation, as well as a man 
of his time. 

This idea of a balance between general and special 
training has been temporarily lost sight of by the neces- 
sity to make room for the modern scientific studies. 
We have adopted the principle that a student may freely 
choose his studies, and so make the most of his natural 
tastes and aptitudes; and the length we go in applying 
the principle is determined, it would seem, rather by 
historical accident than by reasoned policy. If we are 
conservative, we insist that at least every Bachelor of 
Arts shall submit to a drill in both Greek and Latin. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 249 


If we are liberal, we permit the substitution of a 
modern language for one of these. If we are radical, 
we give the pupil carte blanche, and let him choose for 
himself what training he will have. But, whether we 
be conservative, liberal, or radical, we are willing to con- 
fer other degrees besides Bachelor of Arts, and, under 
another label, to send men forth from the university 
who have taken nothing from it but a drill in labora- 
teries and instruction in the use of tools. We have lost 
all idea of a common standard of training for all the 
men alike who seek to be accredited to the world by an 
academic degree. 

Not only so, but in our controversies about the matter 
we have allowed ourselves to be driven into an awkward 
and even untenable position. We debate the relative 
values of a classical training and a scientific, as if it 
turned wholly upon the question of the development of 
the individual mind as a good working instrument. Can 
the man who has received a purely scientific training, 
from which all the nice discriminations of taste and of 
delicate judgment that come from the critical study of 
languages have been left out, use his mind as well as the 
man who has had these; as well as the man who has been 
schooled to submit his faculties to the subtle and refining 
influences of style and syntax, the elevating influences 
of delicate feeling, and the vivid passion of poet and 
orator? ‘The question cannot be answered. ‘The one 
may use his mind quite as well as the other: it depends 
upon what he uses it for. He uses it differently: that is 
all. The values represented by the difference cannot 
be satisfactorily assessed. 

The difference is even very difficult to express. But 
no doubt it can be illustrated. The man who has been 
trained only in science or in technical and narrow lines 
—however well equipped or variously within those lines 
—is confined to them, not because he lacks knowledge, 
but because he lacks sympathy and adaptability. The 
scientific spirit and method, in academic instruction, hold 


250 COLLEGE AND STATE 


their votaries very rigourously to a single point of view, 
and the more this spirit and method are submitted to 
and served, the more restrictive does their mastery be- 
come. It is presently impossible for those who are their 
willing and habituated subjects to understand whereof 
other men speak when they urge considerations which 
cannot be subjected to exact tests or modern standards. 
The men who have been inducted into literature and 
language, on the other hand, while they have obtained 
little marketable knowledge, have obtained both drill 
and an opened view of life. ‘They have, so to say, 
breathed and analyzed the common air of thought that 
the better minds have lived in from the first. They 
have, in greater or less degree, become citizens of the 
intellectual world, and have examined with some critical 
care and a little discrimination the documents by which 
that citizenship is evidenced and secured. ‘They cannot, 
however, make themselves so immediately useful in the 
practical tasks of the world of business as the men of 
the laboratories, the shops, or the purely professional 
schools; and they are thought, by those who have special 
training or capacity, to know nothing. ‘They can use 
their minds, but there is nothing in them to use. They 
possess, at most, only a point of view. They are like 
good soils that have been prepared for planting, but as 
yet contain no edible harvest. The best light of the 
world has shone upon them; they have been watered by 
the tears of old songs, quickened by the passion of deeds 
done long ago; but no merchantable thing has yet been 
sown in them, and the man of science brings his quick 
crop first to market. 

Certainly we have come to the parting of the ways, 
and there is nothing for us but to choose a direction. 
The graduates of our universities no longer go forth 
with a common training which will enable them to hold 
together in a community of thought. Some of them are 
trained in science, some in letters; some well and broadly 
trained, many ill and narrowly, with a hard technicality 


COLLEGE AND STATE 251 


and mean contraction of view. Scarcely one of them 
has been fully inducted into the learning which deals 
with the common experiences, the common thoughts and 
struggles, the old triumphs and defeats of the men of 
his race in the past: their dreams and awakenings; their 
ambitions, humours, confidences, liberties, and follies: 
the intimate stuff of their minds and lives in past gen- 
erations, when others were in like manner graduated 
from college and brought face to face with life and the 
unthinking mass of men. 

The study of institutions and of English literature 
furnishes the only practicable common ground for the 
various disciplines of the modern university curriculum; 
but fortunately it has much more to commend it than its 
practicability. It would furnish also an ideal principle 
of unity. Such studies are practicable because they are 
not open to any serious utilitarian objection. They do 
not involve the long and tedious acquisition of any dead 
language: their tools are of easy use by any one. They 
bear directly upon such practical matter as a man’s use- 
fulness as a citizen and his influence and acceptability as 
a member of society. He can understand other men 
so much the better, command their sympathy the more 
readily, aid them and obtain their aid the more efh- 
ciently, for comprehending affairs and appreciating the 
common movements of sentiment and purpose. Such a 
community of plan is ideal because the great spiritual 
impulses and values which young men get when properly 
trained in the classics can be gotten in part from the 
splendid and various literature of our own tongue, rich 
as it is with treasures both new and old; because men 
trained to the exact standards and accustomed to the 
precise measurements of science, its cold dispassionate- 
ness and cautious reserve of judgment, can get from that 
literature an imagination for affairs and the standards 
by which things invisible and of the spirit are to be 
assessed; and because the men trained in the classics 
can get by it their pilotage into the modern world of 


252 COLLEGE AND STATE 


men and ideas. It makes the classicist more practical 
and the scientist less narrow and pedantic; it is capable 
of giving to things technical an horizon and an eleva- 
tion of spirit, and to things merely scholarly or esthetic 
a thrill and ardour and discipline of life. 

Every university, therefore, which would educate 
men as well as drill them, should make the reading of 
English literature in many sorts and much variety, under 
energetic and quick-witted tutors, compulsory from en- 
trance to graduation; and the study of institutions under 
suggestive lecturers compulsory throughout at least the 
latter half of every course for a degree. It can be 
done, and sooner or later it must be done, if only to 
prevent disintegration and the utter separation and 
segregation of educated men in respect of their ideals 
of thought and conduct. 

But this is the view only from inside the university. 
The greater arguments, from without, are supplied by 
the life of the modern world and the exigencies of 
national existence. ‘The world in which we live is 
troubled by many voices, seeking to proclaim righteous- 
ness and judgment to come; but they disturb without 
instructing us. They cry out upon this point or upon 
that, but they have no whole doctrine which we can 
accept and live. ‘They exaggerate, distort, distract. 
But they are dangerous voices, for all they are so ob- 
viously partial and unwise, because we have no clearly 
conceived standards of common thought to which to 
hold them. Those who hear are as ignorant and as 
fanatical as those who speak. A college man who has 
studied only the classics can no more criticise them than 
the man who has studied only science or the man who 
has studied nothing at all. Even the man who has read 
political economy and history has nowadays, very likely, 
read no literature. He can only cry out from his corner 
that these would-be teachers now everywhere on the 
platform are guilty of errors in logic and misconceptions 
of historical fact in all their revolutionary talk; and 


COLLEGE AND STATE 253 


no one cares to listen to his pedantic and scholastic cor- 
rections: for these, they say, are matters of life and 
death, in which we need, not dialectic, but deliverance. 

There is no corrective for it all like a wide acquaint- 
ance with the best books that men have written, joined 
with a knowledge of the institutions men have made trial 
of in the past; and for each nation there is its own record 
of mental experience and political experiment. Such 
a record always sobers those who read it. It also stead- 
ies the nerves. If all educated men knew it, it would 
be as if they had had a revelation. They could stand 
together and govern, with open eyes and the gift of 
tongues which other men could understand. Here is 
like wild talk and headlong passion for reform in the 
past,—here in the books,—with all the motives that 
underlay the perilous utterance now laid bare: these 
are not new terrors and excitements. Neither need the 
wisdom be new, nor the humanity, by which they shall 
be moderated and turned to righteous ends. There is 
old experience in these matters, or rather in these states 
of mind. It is no new thing to have economic problems 
and dream dreams of romantic and adventurous social 
reconstruction. 

And so it is out of books that we can get our means 
and our self-possession for a sane and systematic criti- 
cism of life; out of our own English books that we can 
get and appropriate and forever recreate the temper 
of our own race in dealing with these so hazardous 
affairs. We shall lose our sense of identity and all 
advantage of being hard-headed Saxons if we become 
ignorant of our literature, which is so full of action and 
of thoughts fit for action. We must look to the univer- 
sities to see to it that we be not denationalized, but 
rather made more steadfast in our best judgments of 
progress. To hear the agitators talk, you would sup- 
pose that righteousness was young and wisdom but of 
yesterday. How are the universities correcting the 
view, and aiding to make this nonsense ridiculous ? How 


254 COLLEGE AND STATE 


many of their graduates know anything clearly to the 
contrary? How many of them know when to laugh? 

Of all things that a university should do for a man, 
the most important is to put him in possession of the 
materials for a systematic criticism of life. Our present 
methods of training may easily enough make tabula rasa 
of a man’s mind in respect of such matters. ‘The reason- 
ing of the scientific method, for all but a few construc- 
tive minds, is analytical reasoning. It picks things to 
pieces and examines them in their ultimate elements. 
It is jealous, if not quite intolerant, of all traditional 
views; will receive nothing, but test everything; and its 
influence is very marked and pervasive. It produces, 
for one thing, an overweening confidence in the pure 
reasoning faculty. Now, it happens that the pure rea- 
soning faculty, whose only standard is logic and whose 
only data are put in terms of determinable force, is 
the worst possible instrument for reforming society. 
The only thing that makes modern socialism more 
dangerous than like doctrine has ever been is, that its 
methods are scientific and that the age also is scientific. 
Two-thirds of our college graduates are not taught 
anything that would predispose them against accepting 
its logic or its purpose to put all things into a laboratory 
of experiment and arbitrarily recombine the elements 
of society. 

The “humane”’ spirit of our time is a very different 
thing from the human spirit. The humanity which we 
nowadays affect is scientific and pathological. It treats 
men as specimens, and seeks to subject them to experi- 
ment. It cuts cross-sections through the human spirit 
and calls its description of what is thereby disclosed 
moral essays and sociological novels. It is self-conscious 
and without modesty or humour. The human spirit 
is a very different thing. It has a memory and a sense 
of humour. It cannot read Ibsen after having read 
Shakespeare, any more than it can prefer sugar and 
butter and flour and sweets separately, in their individual 


COLLEGE AND STATE 255 


intensity, to their toothsome and satisfying combination 
in pudding. Its literature is that which has the one 
flavour for every generation, and the same broad and 
valid sagacity. It regards the scientific method of in- 
vestigation as one, but only one, method of finding out 
the truth; and as a method for finding only one kind 
of truth. It sees the telling points of the socialistic 
argument, but it knows some old standards of justice 
that have outlived many programmes of reform and 
seem still sound enough to outlast these also. ‘It’s a 
imad world, my masters!”’ but it takes a nice balance of 
judgment and a Jong view of human nature to determine 
where the madness lies. 

The worst possible enemy to society is the man who, 
with a strong faculty for reasoning and for action, is 
cut loose in his standards of judgment from the past; 
and universities which train men to use their minds 
without carefully establishing the connection of their 
thought with that of the past, are instruments of social 
destruction. Of course no man’s thought is entirely 
severed from the past, or ever can be. But it is worth 
while to remember that science is no older than the 
present century, and is apt to despise old thought. At 
least its young votaries are: not because they are 
“scientists,” but because they are only scientists. They 
are as much pedants, in their narrowness, as the men 
trained exclusively in the classics, whose thought is all 
in the past. 

The training that will bring these two extremes to- 
gether can be obtained by a thorough familiarity with 
the masterpieces of English thought and with the efforts 
of human genius in the field of institutions. A body of 
men thus made acquainted with their species is needed, 
to give us, at the centre of our political and social life, 
a class with definite and elevated ideals and a real capac- 
ity for understanding the conditions of progress: a 
power making for stability and righteousness against the 
petty and ineffectual turbulence of revolution. 


256 COLLEGE AND STATE 


We mistake the service of literature when we regard 
it as merely esthetic. A literature of such variety as 
our own is nothing less than the annals of the best 
thought of our race upon every topic of life and des- 
tiny. Even our poets have had an eye for affairs; their 
visions have been of men and deeds. And, as for read- 
ing in the literature of institutions, no self-governing 
people can long hold together in order and peace with- 
out it. It is noteworthy that what remains the greatest 
text-book of English law, invaluable in spite of all the 
modern changes which have been hurried forward in 
the century since it was written, was written for lay- 
men. Blackstone intended his lectures for the gentle- 
men of England: to enable the men of Oxford to take 
a place of intelligent authority in society when they 
should come into their own. With the spirit of our 
sane literature in us, and the strong flavour of our in- 
stitutional principles present in all that we do or attempt, 
we shall be broad men enough, be our special training, 
in tools or books, what it may. Without this, we can 
but go astray alike in our private judgments and our 
public functions. 


It would not be necessary to erect a new university to 
try the experiment of such a synthesis of university 
courses; though that would be worth doing, were the 
means made sufficient for a really great object-lesson 
in the right motives of education. Anybody can estab- 
lish the modern sort of university, anywhere. It has 
no necessary nationality or character. But only in a 
free country, with great traditions of enlightened senti- 
ment and continuous purpose, can a university have the 
national mark and distinction of a deliberate espousal 
of the spirit of a noble literature and historic institu- 
tions. Such a university would be a National Academy, 
—the only sort worth having. The thing can be done, 
however, without troubling a millionaire to appropriate 
to himself the glory of a unique function of greatness 


COLLEGE AND STATE 257 


in the development of education. It can be done by 
only a comparatively slight readjustment of subjects 
and instructors in the greater of the universities we 
already have. It can even be done upon no mean scale 
by every college whose resources are at all adequate 
to the ordinary demands of education. 

It may be made the basis for the synthesis now so 
sadly lacking in university plans. Better than any other 
discipline, it can be made the meeting point for all de- 
grees: where candidates in every sort may get their 
liberalizing outlook upon the world of thought and 
affairs. More worthily than any other can it be made 
the means of nationalizing the men whom the univer- 
sities send forth to represent the power and worth of 
education. Inno better way can an American university 
obtain a distinguishing function in the world. 

As a practical means of university reorganization, 
such a plan would sacrifice nothing of our present aca- 
demic freedom. ‘The study of the literature and insti- 
tutions of our stock could be made the common feature 
of all the schools of a modern university without cut- 
ting off any essential part of the separate groups of 
studies we have been at such pains to develop. It would 
not prevent, or even embarrass, specialization. It is 
susceptible of being joined alike to classical studies and 
to technical training; and it would not be incongruously 
joined to either. It would serve ideally, besides, as the 
centre of those compromise and middle courses of study, 
halfway between the classical and the scientific, which 
the peculiar conditions of the day have constrained the 
colleges to offer. It would make all courses in a good 
sense “‘liberal’’ without requiring any wholesale recon- 
sideration of the provisions we have already made to 
train men for the special tasks of practical life. 

The serious practical question is, How are all the 
men of a university to be made to read English literature 
widely and intelligently, as this plan presupposes? For 
it is reading, not set lectures, that will prepare a soil for 


258 COLLEGE AND STATE 


culture: the inside of books, and not talk about them; 
though there must be the latter also, to serve as a chart 
and guide to the reading. The difficulty is not in reality 
very great. A considerable number of young tutors, 
serving their novitiate for full university appointments, 
might easily enough effect an organization of the men 
that would secure the reading. ‘Taking them in groups 
of manageable numbers, suggesting the reading of each 
group, and by frequent interviews and quizzes seeing 
that it was actually done, explaining and stimulating as 
best they might by the way, they could not only get the 
required tasks performed, but relieve them of the hate- 
ful appearance of being tasks, and cheer and enrich the 
whole life of the university. 


PRINCETON IN THE NATION’S SERVICE 


FROM ‘‘THE FORUM,” DECEMBER, 1896, VOL. XXII, PP. 
447-466. AN ORATION DELIVERED AT THE PRINCE- 
TON SESQUI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, OCTOBER 
21, 1896. 


ERENCEEON pauses to look back upon her past, 
not as an old man grown reminiscent, but as a pru- 
dent man still in his youth and lusty prime and at the 
threshold of new tasks, who would remind himself of 
his origin and lineage, recall the pledges of his youth, 
and assess as at a turning in his life the duties of his 
station. 

We look back only a little way to our birth; bet the 
brief space is quick with movement and incident enough 
to crowd a great tract of time. Turn back only one 
hundred and fifty years, and you are deep within quiet 
colony times, before the French and Indian War, or 
thought of separation from England. But a great war 
is at hand. Influences restrained and local presently 
spread themselves at large upon the continent, and the 
whole scene is altered. The brief plot runs with a 
strange force and haste :—First, a quiet group of peace- 
ful colonies, very placid and commonplace and dull, to 
all seeming, in their patient working out of a slow de- 
velopment; then, of a sudden, a hot fire of revolution, 
a quick release of power, as if of forces long pent up, 
but set free at last in the generous heat of the new 
day; the mighty processes of a great migration, the 
vast spaces of a waiting continent filled almost sud- 
denly with hosts bred in the spirit of conquest; a con- 
stant making and renewing of governments, a tremen- 
dous growth, a perilous expansion. Such days of youth 

259 


260 COLLEGE AND STATE 


and nation-making must surely count double the slower 
days of maturity and calculated change, as the spring 
counts double the sober fruitage of the summer. 

Princeton College was founded upon the very eve of 
the stirring changes which put this drama on the stage, 
—not to breed politicians, but to give young men such 
training as, it might be hoped, would fit them hand- 
somely for the pulpit and for the grave duties of citizens 
and neighbors. A small group of Presbyterian ministers 
took the initiative in its foundation. ‘They acted with- 
out ecclesiastical authority, as if under obligation to 
society rather than to the church. They had no more 
vision of what was to come upon the country than their 
fellow-colonists had; they knew only that the pulpits 
of the middle and southern colonies lacked properly 
equipped men and all the youth in those parts ready 
means of access to the higher sort of schooling. They 
thought the discipline at Yale a little less than liberal, 
and the training offered as a substitute in some quarters 
elsewhere a good deal less than thorough. They wanted 
‘‘a seminary of true religion and good literature” which 
should be after their own model and among their own 
people. It was not a sectarian school they wished. They 
were acting as citizens, not as clergymen, and the charter 
they obtained said never a word about creed or doc- 
trine; but they gave religion the first place in their pro- 
gramme, which belonged to it of right, and the forma- 
tion of their college they confided to the Rev. Jonathan 
Dickinson, one of their own number, and a man of such 
mastery as they could trust. 

Their school was first of all merely a little group of 
students gathered about Mr. Dickinson in Elizabeth- 
town. Its master died the very year his labors began; 
and it was necessary to induce the Rev. Aaron Burr, 
one of the trustees, to take the college under his own 
charge at Newark. It was the charm and power of that 
memorable young pastor and teacher which carried it 
forward to a final establishment. Within ten years 


COLLEGE AND STATE 261 


many friends had been made, substantial sums of money 
secured, a new and more liberal charter obtained, and 
a permanent home found at Princeton. And then its 
second president died, while still in his prime, and the 
succession was handed on to other leaders of like quality. 

It was the men, rather than their measures, as usual, 
that had made the college vital from the first and put 
it in a sure way to succeed. ‘The charter was liberal 
and very broad ideas determined the policy of the young 
school. There were laymen upon its board of trustees, 
as well as clergymen—not all Presbyterians, but all 
lovers of progress and men known in the colony: no one 
was more thoroughly the friend of the new venture 
than Governor Belcher, the representative of the crown. 
But the life of the college was in the men who adminis- 
tered it and spoke in its class-rooms,—a notable line of 
thinkers and orators. There were not many men more 
regarded in debate or in counsel in that day than Jona- 
than Dickinson; and Aaron Burr was such a man as 
others turn to and follow with an admiration and trust 
they might be at a loss to explain, so instinctive is it 
and inevitable—a man with a touch of sweet majesty 
in his presence, and a grace and spirit in his manner 
which more than made amends for his small and slender 
figure; the unmistakable fire of eloquence in him when 
he spoke and the fine quality of sincerity. Piety seemed 
with him only a crowning grace. 

For a few brief weeks after Burr was dead Jonathan 
Edwards, whom all the world knows, was president in 
his stead; but death came quickly and left the college 
only his name. Another orator succeeded him, Samuel 
Davies, brought out of Virginia, famous out of all pro- 
portion to his years, you might think, until you heard 
him speak, and knew the charm, the utterance, and the 
character that made him great. He, too, was presently 
taken by the quick way of death, though the college had 
had him but a little while; and Samuel Finley had pre- 
sided in his stead, with a wise sagacity and quiet gift of 


262 COLLEGE AND STATE 


leadership, for all too short a time, and was gone, when 
John Witherspoon came to reign in the little academic 
kingdom for twenty-six years. It was by that time the 
year 1768; Mr. Dickinson had drawn that little group 
of students about him under the first charter only twenty- 
one years ago; the college had been firmly seated in 
Princeton only those twelve years in which it had seen 
Burr and Edwards and Davies and Finley die, and had 
found it not a little hard to live so long in the face of 
its losses and the uneasy movements of the time. It 
had been brought to Princeton in the very midst of the 
French and Indian War, when the country was in doubt 
who should possess the continent. ‘The deep excitement 
of the Stamp act agitation had come, with all its sinister 
threats of embroilment and disaffection, while yet it 
was in its infancy and first effort to live. It was impos- 
sible it should obtain proper endowment or any right and 
equable development in such a season. It ought by 
every ordinary rule of life to have been quite snuffed 
out in the thick and troubled air of the time. New 
Jersey did not, like Virginia and Massachusetts, easily 
form her purpose in that day of anxious doubt. She 
was mixed of many warring elements, as New York 
also was, and suffered a turbulence of spirit that did 
not very kindly breed “true religion and good litera- 
ture.” 

But your thorough Presbyterian is not subject to the 
ordinary laws of life,—is of too stubborn a fibre, too 
unrelaxing a purpose, to suffer mere inconvenience to 
bring defeat. Difficulty bred effort, rather; and Dr. 
Witherspoon found an institution ready to his hand that 
had come already in that quickening time to a sort of 
crude maturity. It was no small proof of its self-pos- 
session and self-knowledge that those who watched over 
it had chosen that very time of crisis to put a man like 
John Witherspoon at the head of its administration, a 
man so compounded of statesman and scholar, Calvinist, 
Scotsman, and orator, that it must ever be a sore puzzle 


COLLEGE AND STATE 263 


where to place or rank him,—whether among great di- 
vines, great teachers, or great statesmen. He seems to 
be all these, and to defy classification, so big is he, so 
various, so prodigal of gifts. His vitality entered like 
a tonic into the college, kept it alive in that time of 
peril,—made it as individual and inextinguishable a force 
as he himself was, alike in scholarship and in public 
affairs. 

It has never been natural, it has seldom been possible, 
in this country for learning to seek a place apart and 
hold aloof from affairs. It is only when society is old, 
long settled to its ways, confident in habit, and without 
self-questionings upon any vital point of conduct, that 
study can effect seclusion and despise the passing inter- 
ests of the day. America has never yet had a season of 
leisured quiet in which students could seek a life apart 
without sharp rigors of conscience, or college instructors 
easily forget that they were training citizens as well as 
drilling pupils; and Princeton is not likely to forget 
that sharp schooling of her youth, when she first learned 
the lesson of public service. She shall not easily get 
John Witherspoon out of her constitution. 

It was a piece of providential good fortune that 
brought such a man to Princeton at such a time. He 
was a man of the sort other men follow and take coun- 
sel of gladly, as if they found in him the full expression 
of what is best in themselves. Not because he was 
always wise; but because he showed always so fine an 
ardor for whatever was worth while and of the better 
part of man’s spirit; because he uttered his thought 
with an inevitable glow of eloquence; because of his 
irresistible charm and individual power. The lively wit 
of the man, besides, struck always upon the matter of 
his thought like a ray of light, compelling men to receive 
what he said or else seem themselves opaque and laugh- 
able. A certain straightforward vigor in his way of 
saying things gave his style an almost irresistible power 
of entering into men’s convictions. A hearty honesty 


264 COLLEGE AND STATE 


showed itself in all that he did and won men’s allegiance 
upon the instant. “Chey loved him even when they had 
the hardihood to disagree with him. 

He came to the college in 1768, and ruled it till he 
died, in 1794. In the very middle of his term as head 
of the college the Revolution came, to draw men’s minds 
imperatively off from everything but war and politics, 
and he returned with all the force and frankness of his 
nature to the public tasks of the great struggle; assisted 
in the making of a new Constitution for the State; be- 
came her spokesman in the Continental Congress; would 
have pressed her on, if he could, to utter a declaration 
of independence of her own before the Congress had 
acted; voted for and signed the great Declaration with 
hearty good will when it came; acted for the country 
in matters alike of war and of finance; stood forth in 
the sight of all the people a great advocate and orator, 
deeming himself forward in the service of God when 
most engaged in the service of men and of liberty. There 
were but broken sessions of the college meanwhile. Each 
army in its turn drove out the little group of students 
who clung to the place. ‘The college building became 
now a military hospital and again a barracks for the 
troops,—for a little while, upon a memorable day in 
1777, a sort of stronghold. New Jersey’s open coun- 
ties became for a time the Revolutionary battleground 
and field of mancuvre. Swept through from end to end 
by the rush of armies, the State seemed the chief seat 
of the war, and Princeton a central point of strategy. 
The dramatic winter of 1776-77 no Princeton man could 
ever forget, lived he never so long,—that winter which 
saw a year of despair turned suddenly into a year of 
hope. In July there had been bonfires and boisterous re- 
joicings in the college yard and in the village street at the 
news of the Declaration of Independence,—for, though 
the rest of the country might doubt and stand timid for 
a little to see the bold thing done, Dr. Witherspoon’s 
pupils were in spirits to know the fight was to be fought 


COLLEGE AND STATE 265 


to a finish. Then suddenly the end had seemed to come. 
Before the year was out Washington was in the place 
beaten and in full retreat, only three thousand men at 
his back, abandoned by his generals, deserted by his 
troops, hardly daring to stop till he had put the un- 
bridged Delaware between himself and his enemy. The 
British came close at his heels and the town was theirs 
until Washington came back again, the third day of the 
new year, early in the morning, and gave his view halloo 
yonder on the hill, as if he were in the hunting field 
again. Then there was fighting in the very streets, and 
cannon planted against the walls of Old North herself. 
"Twas not likely any Princeton man would forget those 
days, when the whole face of the war was changed and 
New Jersey was shaken of the burden of the fighting. 

There was almost always something doing at the 
place when the soldiers were out, for the strenuous 
Scotsman who had the college at his heart never left it 
for long at a time, for all he was so intent upon the 
public business. It was haphazard and piecemeal work, 
no doubt, but there were the spirit and the resolution of 
the Revolution itself in what was done—the spirit of 
Witherspoon. It was not as if some one else had been 
master. Dr. Witherspoon could have pupils at will. 
He was so much else besides schoolmaster and preceptor, 
was so great a figure in the people’s eye, went about so 
like an accepted leader, generously lending a great char- 
acter to a great cause, that he could bid men act and 
know that they would heed him. 

The time, as well as his own genius, enabled him to 
put a distinctive stamp upon his pupils. There was 
close contact between master and pupils in that day of 
beginnings. There were not often more than a hundred 
students in attendance at the college, and the president, 
for at any rate half their course, was himself their chief 
instructor. ‘There were two or three tutors to whom 
the instruction of the lower classes was entrusted; Mr. 
Houston was professor of mathematics and natural 


266 COLLEGE AND STATE 


philosophy and Dr. Smith professor of moral philoso- 
phy and divinity, but the president set the pace. It was 
he who gave range and spirit to the course of study. 
He lectured upon taste and style, as well as upon ab- 
stract questions of philosophy, and upon politics as a 
science of government and of public duty, as little to be 
forgotten as religion itself in any well-considered plan 
of life. He had found the college ready to serve such 
purpose when he came, because of the stamp Burr and 
Davies and Finley had put upon it. They had, one and 
all, consciously set themselves to make the college a 
place where young men’s minds should be rendered fit 
for affairs, for the public ministry of the bench and 
senate, as well as of the pulpit. It was in Finley’s day, 
but just now gone by, that the college had sent out such 
men as William Paterson, Luther Martin, and Oliver 
Ellsworth. Witherspoon but gave quickened life to 
the old spirit and method of the place where there had 
been drill from the first in public speech and public spirit. 

And the Revolution, when it came, seemed but an 
object lesson in his scheme of life. It was not simply 
fighting that was done at Princeton. The little town 
became for a season the centre of politics, too; once 
and again the Legislature of the State sat in the college 
hall, and its revolutionary Council of Safety. Soldiers 
and public men whose names the war was making known 
to every man frequented the quiet little place, and racy 
talk ran high in the jolly tavern where hung the sign of 
Hudibras. Finally the Federal Congress itself sought 
the place and filled the college hall with a new scene, 
sitting a whole season there to do its business,—its presi- 
dent a trustee of the college. A commencement day 
came which saw both Washington and Witherspoon on 
the platform together,—the two men, it was said, who 
could not be matched for striking presence in all the 
country,—and the young salutatorian turned to the 
country’s leader to say what it was in the hearts of all 
to utter. The sum of the town’s excitement was made 


COLLEGE AND STATE 267 


up when, upon that notable last day of October, in the 
year 1783, news of peace came to that secluded hall, to 
add a crowning touch of gladness to the gay and bril- 
liant company met to receive with formal welcome the 
Minister Plenipotentiary but just come from the Nether- 
lands, Washington moving amongst them the hero 
whom the news enthroned. 

It was no single stamp that the college gave its pupils. 
James Madison, Philip Freneau, Aaron Burr, and 
Harry Lee had come from it almost at a single birth, 
between 1771 and 1773—-James Madison, the philo- 
sophical statesman, subtly compounded of learning and 
practical sagacity; Philip Freneau, the careless poet and 
reckless pamphleteer of a party; Aaron Burr, with genius 
enough to have made him immortal and unschooled pas- 
sion enough to have made him infamous; ‘“‘Lighthorse 
Harry” Lee, a Rupert in battle, a boy in counsel, high- 
strung, audacious, wilful, lovable, a figure for romance. 
These men were types of the spirit of which the college 
was full; the spirit of free individual development which 
found its perfect expression in the president himself. 

It has been said that Mr. Madison’s style in writing 
is like Dr. Witherspoon’s, albeit not so apt a weapon 
for the quick thrust and instant parry; and it is recalled 
that Madison returned to Princeton after his gradua- 
tion and lingered yet another year in study with his 
master. But in fact his style is no more like Wither- 
spoon’s than Harry Lee’s way of fighting was. No 
doubt there was the same firmness of touch, the same 
philosophical breadth, the same range of topic and 
finished force of argument in Dr. Witherspoon’s essays 
upon public questions that are to be found in Madison’s 
papers in the “Federalist” ; but Dr. Witherspoon fought, 
too, with the same overcoming dash that made men 
know Harry Lee in the field, albeit with different weap- 
ons and upon another arena. 

Whatever we may say of these matters, however, one 
thing is certain: Princeton sent upon the public stage 


268 COLLEGE AND STATE 


an extraordinary number of men of notable quality in 
those days; became herself for a time in some visible 
sort the academic centre of the Revolution, fitted, among 
the rest, the man in whom the country was one day 
to recognize the chief author of the Federal Constitu- 
tion. Princetonians are never tired of telling how many 
public men graduated from Princeton in Witherspoon’s 
time,—twenty Senators, twenty-three Representatives, 
thirteen Governors, three Judges of the Supreme Court 
of the Union; one Vice-President, and a President; all 
within a space of twenty years, and from a college which 
seldom had more than a hundred students. Nine Prince- 
ton men sat in the Constitutional Convention of 1787; 
and, though but six of them were Witherspoon’s pupils, 
there was no other college that had there so many as 
six, and the redoubtable Doctor might have claimed all 
nine as his in spirit and capacity. Madison guided the 
convention through the critical stages of its anxious 
work, with a tact, a gentle quietness, an art of leading 
without insisting, ruling without commanding,—an 
authority, not of tone or emphasis, but of apt sugges- 
tion,—such as Dr. Witherspoon could never have exer- 
cised. Princeton men fathered both the Virginia plan, 
which was adopted, and the New Jersey plan, which 
was rejected; and Princeton men advocated the compro- 
mises without which no plan could have won acceptance. 
The strenuous Scotsman’s earnest desire and prayer to 
God to see a government set over the nation that should 
last was realized as even he might not have been bold 
enough to hope. No man had ever better right to re- 
joice in his pupils. 

It would be absurd to pretend that we can distinguish 
Princeton’s touch and method in the Revolution or her 
distinctive handiwork in the Constitution of the Union. 
We can show nothing more of historical fact than that 
her own president took a great place of leadership in 
that time of change, and became one of the first figures 
of the age; that the college which he led and to which 


COLLEGE AND STATE 269 


he gave his spirit contributed more than her share of 
public men to the making of the nation, outranked her 
elder rivals in the roll-call of the Constitutional Con- 
vention, and seemed for a little a seminary of statesmen 
rather than a quiet seat of academic learning. What 
takes our admiration and engages our fancy in looking 
back to that time is the generous union then established 
in the college between the life of philosophy and the 
life of the state. 

It moves her sons very deeply to find Princeton to 
have been from the first what they know her to have 
been in their own day,—a school of duty. The revolu- 
tionary days are gone, and you shall not find upon her 
rolls another group of names given to public life that 
can equal her muster in the days of the Revolution and 
the formation of the government. But her rolls read 
since the old days, if you know but a little of the quiet 
life of scattered neighborhoods, like a roster of trus- 
tees, a list of the silent men who carry the honorable 
burdens of business and of social obligations,—of such 
names as keep credit and confidence in heart. They 
suggest a soil full of the old seed, and ready, should 
the air of the time move shrewdly upon it as in the 
old days, to spring once more into the old harvest. The 
various, boisterous strength of the young men of affairs 
who went out with Witherspoon’s touch upon them, is 
obviously not of the average breed of any place, but the 
special fruitage of an exceptional time. Later genera- 
tions inevitably reverted to the elder type of Paterson 
and Ellsworth, the type of sound learning and stout 
character, without bold impulse added or any uneasy 
hope to change the world. It has been Princeton’s work, 
in all ordinary seasons, not to change but to strengthen 
society, to give, not yeast, but bread for the raising. 

It is in this wise Princeton has come into our own 
hands; and to-day we stand as those who would count 
their force for the future. The men who made Prince- 
ton are dead; those who shall keep it and better it still 


270 COLLEGE AND STATE 


live: they are even ourselves. Shall we not ask ere we 
go forward, what gave the place its spirit and its air 
of duty? ‘“‘We are now men, and must accept in the 
highest spirit the same transcendent destiny, and not 
pinched in a corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolu- 
tion, but redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants to 
be noble clay plastic under the Almighty effort, let us 
advance and advance on chaos and the dark!” 

No one who looks into the life of the Institution shall 
find it easy to say what gave it its spirit and kept it in 
its character the generations through; but some things 
lie obvious to the view in Princeton’s case. She had 
always been a school of religion, and no one of her sons, 
who has really lived her life, has escaped that steadying 
touch which has made her a school of duty. Religion, 
conceive it but liberally enough, is the true salt where- 
with to keep both duty and learning sweet against the 
taint of time and change; and it is a noble thing to have 
conceived it thus liberally, as Princeton’s founders did. 

Churches among us, as all the world knows, are free 
and voluntary societies separated to be nurseries of be- 
lief, not suffered to become instruments of rule; and 
those who serve them can be free citizens, as well as 
faithful churchmen. The men who founded Princeton 
were pastors, not ecclesiastics. “Their ideal was the ser- 
vice of congregations and communities, not the service 
of achurch. Duty with them was a practical thing, con- 
cerned with righteousness in this world, as well as with 
salvation in the next. ‘There is nothing that gives such 
pith to public service as religion. A God of truth is no 
mean prompter to the enlightened service of mankind; 
and character formed as if in His eye has always a 
fibre and sanction such as you shall not obtain for the 
ordinary man from the mild promptings of philosophy. 

This, I cannot doubt, is the reason why Princeton has 
formed practical men, whom the world could trust to 
do its daily work like men of honor. There were men 
in Dr. Witherspoon’s day who doubted him the right 


COLLEGE AND STATE 271 


preceptor for those who sought the ministry of the 
church, seeing him “as high a son of liberty as any man 
in America,” and turned agitator rather than preacher; 
and he drew about him, as troubles thickened, young 
politicians rather than candidates for the pulpit. But 
it is noteworthy that observing men in far Virginia sent 
their sons to be with Dr. Witherspoon because they saw 
intrigue and the taint of infidelity coming upon their own 
college of William and Mary, Mr. Madison among the 
rest; and that young Madison went home to read theol- 
ogy with earnest system ere he went out to the tasks of 
his life. He had no thought of becoming a minister, 
but his master at Princeton had taken possession of his 
mind and had enabled him to see what knowledge was 
profitable. 

The world has long thought that it detected in the 
academic life some lack of sympathy with itself, some 
- disdain of the homely tasks which make the gross globe 
inhabitable,—not a little proud aloofness and lofty 
superiority, as if education always softened the hands 
and alienated the heart. It must be admitted that books 
are a great relief from the haggling of the market, libra- 
ries a very welcome refuge from the strife of commerce. 
We feel no anxiety about ages that are past; old books 
draw us pleasantly off from responsibility, remind us 
nowhere of what there is to do. We can easily hold 
the services of mankind at arm’s length while we read 
and make scholars of ourselves. But we shall be very 
uneasy, the while, if the high mandates of religion are 
let in upon us and made part of our thought. The quiet 
scholar has his proper breeding, and truth must be 
searched out and held aloft for men to see for its own 
sake, by such as will not leave off their sacred task until 
death takes them away. But not many pupils of a col- 
lege are to be investigators; they are to be citizens and 
the world’s servants in every field of practical endeavor, 
and in their instruction the college must use learning 
as a vehicle of spirit, interpreting literature as the voice 


272 COLLEGE AND STATE 


of humanity,—must enlighten, guide, and hearten its 
sons, that it may make men of them. If it give them 
no vision of the true God, it has given them no certain 
motive to practise the wise lessons they have learned. 
It is noteworthy how often God-fearing men have 
been forward in those revolutions which have vindicated 
rights, and how seldom in those which have wrought a 
work of destruction. There was a spirit of practical 
piety in the revolutionary doctrines which Dr. Wither- 
spoon taught. Noman, particularly no young man, who 
heard him could doubt his cause a righteous cause, or 
deem religion aught but a prompter in it. Revolution 
was not to be distinguished from duty in Princeton. 
Duty becomes the more noble when thus conceived the 
“stern daughter of the voice of God’’; and that voice 
must ever seem near and in the midst of life if it be made 
to sound dominant from the first in all thought of men 
and the world. It has not been by accident, therefore, 
that Princeton men have been inclined to public life. A 
strong sense of duty is a fretful thing in confinement, 
and will not easily consent to be kept at home cooped 
up within a narrow round. ‘The university in our day 
is no longer inclined to stand aloof from the practical 
world, and, surely, it ought never to have had the dis- 
position to do so. It is the business of a university to 
impart to the rank and file of the men whom it trains the 
right thought of the world, the thought which it has 
tested and established, the principles which have stood 
through the seasons and become at length a part of 
the immemorial wisdom of the race. The object of 
education is not merely to draw out the powers of the 
individual mind; it is rather its object to draw all 
minds to a proper adjustment to the physical and social 
world in which they are to have their life and their de- 
velopment: to enlighten, strengthen, and make fit. The 
business of the world is not individual success, but its 
own betterment, strengthening, and growth in spiritual 
insight. ‘‘So teach us to number our days that we 


COLLEGE AND STATE a73 


may apply our hearts unto wisdom” is its right prayer 
and aspiration. 

It was not a work of destruction which Princeton 
helped forward even in that day of storm which came 
at the Revolution, but a work of preservation. The 
American Revolution wrought, indeed, a radical work 
of change in the world; it created a new nation and a 
new polity; but it was a work of conservation after all, 
as fundamentally conservative as the revolution of 
1688 or the extortion of Magna Charta. A change 
of allegiance and the erection of a new nation in the 
West were its inevitable results, but not its objects. 
Its object was the preservation of a body of liberties, 
to keep the natural course of English development in 
America clear of impediment. It was meant, not in 
rebellion, but in self-defence. If it brought change, it 
was the change of maturity, the fulfilment of destiny, 
the appropriate fruitage of wholesome and steady 
growth. It was part of English liberty that America 
should be free. The thought of our Revolution was 
as quick and vital in the minds of Chatham and of 
Burke as in the minds of Otis and Henry and Wash- 
ington. ‘There is nothing so conservative of life as 
growth; when that stops, decay sets in and the end 
comes on apace. Progress is life, for the body politic 
as for the body natural. To stand still is to court 
death. 

Here, then, if you will but look, you have the law 
of conservatism disclosed: it is a law of progress. But 
not all change is progress, not all growth is the mani- 
festation of life. Let one part of the body be in haste 
to outgrow the rest and you have malignant disease, 
the threat of death. The growth that is a manifesta- 
tion of life is equable, draws its springs gently out of 
the old fountains of strength, builds upon old tissue, 
covets the old airs that have blown upon it time out 
of mind in the past. Colleges ought surely to be the 
best nurseries of such life, the best schools of the prog- 


274 COLLEGE AND STATE 


ress which conserves. Unschooled men have only their 
habits to remind them of the past, only their desires 
and their instinctive judgments of what is right to 
guide them into the future: the college should serve 
the State as its organ of recollection, its seat of vital 
memory. It should give the country men who know 
the probabilities of failure and success, who can separate 
the tendencies which are permanent from the tendencies 
which are of the moment merely, who can distinguish 
promises from threats, knowing the life men have lived, 
the hopes they have tested, and the principles they have 
proved. 

This college gave the country at least a handful of 
such men, in its infancy, and its president for leader. 
The blood of John Knox ran in Witherspoon’s veins. 
The great drift and movement of English liberty, from 
Magna Charta down, was in all his teachings; his pu- 
pils knew as well as Burke did that to argue the Amer- 
icans out of their liberties would be to falsify their 
pedigree. ‘In order to prove that the Americans have 
no right to their liberties,” Burke cried, ‘“we are every 
day endeavoring to subvert the maxims which preserve 
the whole spirit of our own’; the very antiquarians of 
the law stood ready with their proof that the colonies 
could not be taxed by Parliament. This Revolution, 
at any rate, was a keeping of faith with the past. To 
stand for it was to be like Hampden, a champion of 
law though he withstood the king. It was to emulate 
the example of the very men who had founded the gov- 
ernment then for a little while grown so tyrannous 
and forgetful of its great traditions. This was the 
compulsion of life, not of passion, and college halls were 
a better school of revolution than colonial assemblies. 

Provided, of course, they were guided by such a spirit 
as Witherspoon’s. Nothing is easier than to falsify the 
past; lifeless instruction will do it. If you rob it of 
vitality, stiffen it with pedantry, sophisticate it with 
argument, chill it with unsympathetic comment, you ren- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 275 


der it as dead as any academic exercise. The safest 
way in all ordinary seasons is to let it speak for it- 
self; resort to its records, listen to its poets and to its 
masters in the humbler art of prose. Your real and 
proper object, after all, is not to expound, but to realize 
it, consort with it, and make your spirit kin with it, so 
that you may never shake the sense of obligation off. 
In short, I believe that the catholic study of the world’s 
literature as a record of spirit is the right preparation 
for leadership in the world’s affairs, if you undertake 
it like a man and not like a pedant. 

Age is marked in the case of every people, just as it 
is marked in the case of every work of art, into which 
enters the example of the masters, the taste of long 
generations of men, the thought that has matured, the 
achievement that has come with assurance. ‘The child’s 
crude drawing shares the primitive youth of the first 
hieroglyphics; but a little reading, a few lessons from 
some modern master, a little time in the Old World’s 
galleries set the lad forward a thousand years and 
more, make his drawings as old as art itself. ‘The art 
of thinking is as old, and it is the university’s function 
to impart it in all its length: the stiff and difficult stuffs 
of fact and experience, of prejudice and affection, in 
which the hard art is to work its will, and the long and 
tedious combinations of cause and effect out of which 
it is to build up its results., How else would you avoid a 
ceaseless round of error? ‘The world’s memory must 
be kept alive, or we shall never see an end of its old 
mistakes. We are in danger of losing our identity and 
becoming infantile in every generation. ‘That is the 
real menace under which we cower everywhere in this 
age of change. The Old World trembles to see its prole- 
tariat in the saddle; we stand dismayed to find our- 
selves growing no older, always as young as the informa- 
tion of our most numerous voters. The danger does 
not lie in the fact that the masses whom we have en- 


276 COLLEGE AND STATE 


franchised seek to work any iniquity upon us, for their 
aim, take it in the large, is to make a righteous polity. 
The peril lies in this, that the past is discredited among 
them, because they played no choosing part in it. It 
was their enemy, they say, and they will not learn of 
it. They wish to break with it forever; its lessons 
are tainted to their taste. 

In America, especially, we run perpetually this risk 
of newness. Righteously enough, it is in part a conse- 
quence of boasting. To enhance our credit for orig- 
inality, we boasted for long that our institutions were 
ene and all our own inventions, and the pleasing error 
was so got into the common air by persistent discharges 
of oratory that every man’s atmosphere became sur- 
charged with it, and it seems now quite too late to dis- 
lodge it. Three thousand miles of sea, moreover, roll 
between us and the elder past of the world. We are 
isolated here. We cannot see other nations in detail, 
and looked at in the large they do not seem like our- 
selves. Our problems, we say, are our own, and we 
will take our own way of solving them. Nothing seems 
audacious among us, for our case seems to us to stand 
singular and without parallel. We run in a frée field, 
without recollection of failure, without heed of ex- 
ample. 

This danger is nearer to us now than it was in the 
days of armed revolution. The men whom Madison 
led in the making of the Constitution were men who 
regarded the past. They had flung off from the mother 
country, not to get a new liberty but to preserve an 
eld, not to break a Constitution but to keep it. It was 
the glory of the Convention of 1787 that it made choice 
in the framing of the government of principles which 
Englishmen everywhere had tested, and of an organiza- 
tion of which in every part Americans themselves had 
somewhere made trial. In every essential part they 
built out of old stuffs whose grain and fibre they knew. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 277 


“Tis not in battles that from youth we train 
The Governor who must be wise and good, 
And temper with the sternness of the brain 
Thoughts motherly, and meek as womanhood. 
Wisdom doth live with children round her knees: 
Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk 
Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk 
Of the mind’s business: these are the degrees 
By which true sway doth mount; this is the stalk 
True power doth grow on; and her rights are these.” 


The men who framed the government were not radi- 
cals. They trimmed old growths, and were not for- 
getful of the old principles of husbandry. 

It is plain that it is the duty of an institution of 
learning set in the midst of a free population and 
amidst signs of social change, not merely to implant a 
sense of duty, but to illuminate duty by every lesson 
that can be drawn out of the past. It is not a dog- 
matic process. I know of no book in which the lessons 
of the past are set down. I do not know of any 
man whom the world could trust to write such a book. 
But it somehow comes about that the man who has 
travelled in the realms of thought brings lessons home 
with him which make him grave and wise beyond his 
fellows, and thoughtful with the thoughtfulness of a 
true man of the world. 

He is not a true man of the world who knows only 
the present fashions of it. In good breeding there is 
always the fine savor of generations of gentlemen, a 
tradition of courtesy, the perfect knowledge of long 
practice. The world of affairs is so old no man can 
know it who knows only that little last segment of it 
which we call the present. We have a special name 
for the man who observes only the present fashions of 
the world, and it is a less honorable name than that 
which we use to designate the grave and thoughtful 
gentlemen who keep so steadily to the practices that 
have made the world wise and at ease these hundreds of 
years. We cannot pretend to have formed the world, 


278 COLLEGE AND STATE 


and we are not destined to reform it. We cannot even 
mend it and set it forward by the reasonable measures 
of a single generation’s work if we forget the old proc- 
esses or lose our mastery over them. We should have 
scant capital to trade on were we to throw away the 
wisdom we have inherited and seek our fortunes with 
the slender stock we have ourselves accumulated. This, 
it seems to me, is the real, the prevalent argument for 
holding every man we can to the intimate study of the 
ancient classics. Latin and Greek, no doubt, have a 
grammatical and syntactical habit which challenges the 
mind that would master it to a severer exercise of 
analytical power than the easy-going synthesis of any 
modern tongue demands; but substitutes in kind may 
be found for that drill. What you cannot find a sub- 
stitute for is the classics as literature; and there can 
be no first-hand contact with that literature if you will 
not master the grammar and the syntax which convey 
its subtle power. Your enlightenment depends on the 
company you keep. You do not know the world until 
vou know the men who have possessed it and tried its 
ways before ever you were given your brief run upon 
it. And there is no sanity comparable with that which 
is schooled in the thoughts that will keep. It is such a 
schooling that we get from the world’s literature. ‘The 
books have disappeared which were not genuine,— 
which spoke things which, if they were worth saying at 
all, were not worth hearing more than once, as well 
as the books which spoke permanent things clumsily 
and without the gift of interpretation. ‘The kind air 
which blows from age to age has disposed of them like 
vagrant leaves. ‘There was sap in them for a little, 
but now they are gone, we do not know where. All 
literature that has lasted has this claim upon us: that 
it is not dead; but we cannot be quite so sure of any 
as we are of the ancient literature that still lives, be- 
cause none has lived so long. It holds a sort of 
primacy in the aristocracy of natural selection. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 279 


Read it, moreover, and you shall find another proof 
of vitality in it, more significant still. You shall recog- 
nize its thoughts, and even its fancies, as your long- 
time familiars—shall recognize them as the thoughts 
that have begotten a vast deal of your own literature. 
We read the classics and exclaim, in our vanity: ‘How 
modern! it might have been written yesterday.”’ Would 
it not be more true, as well as more instructive, to ex- 
claim concerning our own ideas: “How ancient! they 
have been true these thousand years’? It is the gen- 
eral air of the world a man gets when he reads the 
classics, the thinking which depends upon no time but 
only upon human nature, which seems full of the voices 
of the human spirit, quick with the power which moves 
ever upon the face of affairs. ‘‘What Plato has thought 
he may think; what a saint has felt he may feel; what 
at any time has befallen any man he can understand.” 
There is the spirit of a race in the Greek literature, 
the spirit of quite another people in the books of Virgil 
and Horace and Tacitus; but in all a mirror of the 
world, the old passion of the soul, the old hope that 
keeps so new, the informing memory, the persistent fore- 
cast. 

It has always seemed to me an odd thing, and a 
thing against nature that the literary man, the man 
whose citizenship and freedom are of the world of 
thought, should ever have been deemed an unsafe man 
in affairs; and yet I suppose there is not always injustice 
in the judgment. It is a perilously pleasant and be- 
guiling comradeship, the company of authors. Not 
many men when once they are deep in it will leave 
its engaging thought of things gone by to find their 
practical duties in the present. But you are not mak- 
ing an undergraduate a man of letters when you keep 
him four short years at odd, or even at stated, hours 
in the company of authors. You shall have done much 
if you make him feel free among them. 

This argument for enlightenment holds scarcely less 


280 COLLEGE AND STATE 


good, of course, in behalf of the study of modern litera- 
ture, and especially the literature of your own race and 
country. You should not belittle culture by esteeming 
it a thing of ornament, an accomplishment rather than 
a power. A cultured mind is a mind quit of its awk- 
wardness, eased of all impediment and illusion, made 
quick and athletic in the acceptable exercise of power. 
It is a mind at once informed and just,—a mind habitu- 
ated to choose its course with knowledge, and filled with 
full assurance, like one who knows the world and can 
live in it without either unreasonable hope or unwar- 
ranted fear. It cannot complain, it cannot trifle, it 
cannot despair. Leave pessimism to the uncultured, 
who do not know reasonable hope; leave fantastic hopes 
to the uncultured, who do not know the reasonableness 
of failure. Show that your mind has lived in the world 
ere now; has taken counsel with the elder dead who 
still live, as well as with the ephemeral living who can- 
not pass their graves. Help men, but do not delude 
them. 

I believe, of course, that there is another way of pre- 
paring young men to be wise. I need hardly say that 
I believe in full, explicit instruction in history and in 
politics, in the experiences of peoples and the fortunes 
of governments, in the whole story of what men have 
attempted and what they have accomplished through 
all the changes both of form and of purpose in their or- 
ganization of their common life. Many minds will re- 
ceive and heed this systematic instruction which have no' 
ears for the voice that is in the printed page of litera- 
ture. But, just as it is one thing to sit here in re- 
publican America and hear a credible professor tell 
of the soil of allegiance in which the British monarchy 
grows, and quite another to live where Victoria is queen 
and hear common men bless her with full confession of 
loyalty, so it is one thing to hear of systems of govern- 
ment in histories and treatises and quite another to feel 


COLLEGE AND STATE 281 


them in the pulses of the poets and prose writers who 
have lived under them. 

It used to be taken for granted—did it not ?—that 
colleges would be found always on the conservative side 
in politics (except on the question of free trade) ; but 
in this latter day a great deal has taken place which goes 
far toward discrediting the presumption. ‘The college 
in our day lies very near indeed to the affairs of the 
world. It is a place of the latest experiments; its 
laboratories are brisk with the spirit of discovery; its 
lecture rooms resound with the discussion of new theo- 
ries of life and novel programmes of reform. There 
is no radical like your learned radical, bred in the 
schools; and thoughts of revolution have in our time 
been harbored in universities as naturally as they were 
once nourished among the Encyclopedists. It is the 
scientific spirit of the age which has wrought the change. 
I stand with my hat off at very mention of the great 
men who have made our age an age of knowledge. No 
man more heartily admires, more gladly welcomes, more 
approvingly reckons the gain and the enlightenment that 
have come to the world through the extraordinary ad- 
vances in physical science which this great age has wit- 
nessed. He would be a barbarian and a lover of dark- 
ness who should grudge that great study any part of its 
triumph. But I am a student of society and should 
deem myself unworthy of the comradeship of great men 
of science should I not speak the plain truth with re- 
gard to what I see happening under my own eyes. | 
have no laboratory but the world of books and men in 
which I live; but I am much mistaken if the scientific 
spirit of the age is not doing us a great disservice, 
working in us a certain great degeneracy. Science has 
bred in us a spirit of experiment and a contempt for 
the past. It made us credulous of quick improvement, 
hopeful of discovering panaceas, confident of success 
in every new thing. 

I wish to be as explicit as carefully chosen words will 


282 COLLEGE AND STATE 


enable me to be upon a matter so critical, so radical as 
this. JI have no indictment against what science has 
done: I have only a warning to utter against the at- 
mosphere which has stolen from laboratories into lec- 
ture rooms and into the general air of the world at 
large. Science—our science—is new. It is a child of 
the nineteenth century. It has transformed the world 
and owes little debt of obligation to any past age. It 
has driven mystery out of the Universe; it has made 
malleable stuff of the hard world, and laid it out in its 
elements upon the table of every class-room. Its own 
masters have known its limitations: they have stopped 
short at the confines of the physical universe; they have 
declined to reckon with spirit or with the stuffs of the 
mind, have eschewed sense and confined themselves to 
sensation. But their work has been so stupendous that 
all other men of all other studies have been set staring 
at their methods, imitating their ways of thought, ogling 
their results. We look in our study of the classics 
nowadays more at the phenomena of language than at 
the movement of spirit; we suppose the world which is 
invisible to be unreal; we doubt the efficacy of feeling 
and exaggerate the efliicacy of knowledge; we speak of 
society as an organism and believe that we can con- 
trive for it a new environment which will change the 
very nature of its constituent parts; worst of all, we 
believe in the present and in the future more than in 
the past, and deem the newest theory of society the 
likeliest. This is the disservice scientific study has done 
us: it has given us agnosticism in the realm of philoso- 
phy, scientific anarchism in the field of politics. It has 
made the legislator confident that he can create, and 
the philosopher sure that God cannot. Past experi- 
ence is discredited and the laws of matter are supposed 
to apply to spirit and the make-up of society. 

Let me say once more, this is not the fault of the 
scientist; he has done his work with an intelligence and 
success which cannot be too much admired. It is the 


COLLEGE AND STATE 283 


work of the noxious, intoxicating gas which has some- 
how got into the lungs of the rest of us from out the 
crevices of his workshop—a gas, it would seem, which 
forms only in the outer air, and where men do not 
know the right use of their lungs. I should tremble to 
see social reform led by men who had breathed it; I 
should fear nothing better than utter destruction from 
a revolution conceived and led in the scientific spirit. 
Science has not changed the laws of social growth or 
betterment. Science has not changed the nature of 
society, has not made history a whit easier to under- 
stand, human nature a whit easier to reform. It has 
won for us a great liberty in the physical world, a 
liberty from superstitious fear and from disease, a free- 
dom to use nature as a familiar servant; but it has not 
freed us from ourselves. It has not purged us of 
passion or disposed us to virtue. It has not made us 
less covetous or less ambitious or less self-indulgent. 
On the contrary, it may be suspected of having enhanced 
our passions, by making wealth so quick to come, so 
fickle to stay. It has wrought such instant, incredible 
improvement in all the physical setting of our life, that 
we have grown the more impatient of the unreformed 
condition of the part it has not touched or bettered, 
and we want to get at our spirits and reconstruct them 
in like radical fashion by like processes of experiment. 

We have broken with the past and have come into a 
new world. 

Can any one wonder, then, that I ask for the old 
drill, the old memory of times gone by, the old school- 
ing in precedent and tradition, the old keeping of faith 
with the past, as a preparation for leadership in days 
of social change? We have not given science too big 
a place in our education; but we have made a perilous 
mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method 
in every other branch of study. We must make the hu- 
manities human again; must recall what manner of men 


284 COLLEGE AND STATE 


we are; must turn back once more to the region of 
practicable ideals. 

Of course, when all is said, it is not learning but the 
spirit of service that will give a college place in the 
public annals of the nation. It is indispensable, it seems 
to me, if it is to do its right service, that the air of 
affairs should be admitted to all its class-rooms. I do 
not mean the air of party politics, but the air of the 
world’s transactions, the consciousness of the solidarity 
of the race, the sense of the duty of man toward man, 
of the presence of men in every problem, of the sig- 
nificance of truth for guidance as well as for knowl- 
edge, of the potency of ideas, of the promise and the 
hope that shine in the face of all knowledge. There 
is laid upon us the compulsion of the national life. We 
dare not keep aloof and closet ourselves while a nation 
comes to its maturity. The days of glad expansion 
are gone, our life grows tense and difficult; our re- 
source for the future lies in careful thought, providence, 
and a wise economy; and the school must be of the 
nation. 

I have had sight of the perfect place of learning in 
my thought: a free place, and a various, where no | 
man could be and not know with how great a destiny 
knowledge had come into the world—itself a little 
world; but not perplexed, living with a singleness of 
aim not known without; the home of sagacious men, 
hard-headed and with a will to know, debaters of the 
world’s questions every day and used to the rough 
ways of democracy; and yet a place removed—calm 
Science seated there, recluse, ascetic, like a nun; not 
knowing that the world passes, not caring, if the truth 
but come in answer to her prayer; and Literature, walk- 
ing within her open doors, in quiet chambers, with men 
of olden time, storied walls about her, and calm voices 
infinitely sweet; here “magic casements, opening on 
the foam of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn,” to 
which you may withdraw and use your youth for pleas- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 285 


ure; there windows open straight upon the street, where 
many stand and talk, intent upon the world of men and 
business. A place where ideals are kept in heart in 
an air they can breathe; but no fool’s paradise. A place 
where to hear the truth about the past and hold debate 
about the affairs of the present, with knowledge and 
without passion; like the world in having all men’s 
life at heart, a place for men and all that concerns 
them; but unlike the world in its self-possession, its 
thorough way of talk; its care to know more than the 
moment brings to light; slow to take excitement, its 
air pure and wholesome with a breath of faith; every 
eye within it bright in the clear day and quick to look 
toward heaven for the confirmation of its hope. Who 
shall show us the way to this place? 


MR. CLEVELAND AS PRESIDENT 


FROM THE “ATLANTIC MONTHLY,” MARCH, 1897, VOL. 
LXXIX, PP. 289-300. WALTER H. PAGE WAS THEN 
EDITOR OF THE “ATLANTIC MONTHLY.” 


T is much too early to attempt to assign to Mr. 
Cleveland his place in the history of our government 
and policy. That he has played a very great and in: 
dividual part in our affairs no one can doubt. But we 
are still too near him to see his work in its just per- 
spective; we cannot yet see or estimate him as an 
historical figure. 

It is plain, however, that Mr. Cleveland has rendered 
the country great services, and that his singular inde- 
pendence and force of purpose have made the real 
character of the government of the United States more 
evident than it ever was before. He has been the sort 
of President the makers of the Constitution had vaguely 
in mind: more man than partisan; with an independent 
executive will of his own; hardly a colleague of the 
Houses so much as an individual servant of the coun- 
try; exercising his powers like a chief magistrate rather 
than like a party leader. Washington showed a like 
individual force and separateness; but he had been the 
country’s leader through all its Revolution, and was 
always a kind of hero, whom parties could not absorb. 
Jackson worked his own will as President, and seemed 
to change the very nature of the government while he 
reigned; but it was a new social force that spoke in him, 
and he re-created a great party. Lincoln made the 
presidency the government while the war lasted, and 
gave the nation a great ruler; but his purposes were 
those of a disciplined and determined party, and his 

286 


COLLEGE AND STATE 287 


time was a time of fearful crisis, when men studied 
power, not law. No one of these men seems the nor- 
mal President, or affords example of the usual courses 
of administration. Mr. Cleveland has been President 
in ordinary times, but after an extraordinary fashion; 
not because he wished to form or revolutionize or save 
the government, but because he came fresh to his tasks 
without the common party training, a direct, fearless, 
somewhat unsophisticated man of action. In him we 
got a President, as it were, by immediate choice from 
out the body of the people, as the Constitution has all 
along appeared to expect, and he has refreshed our 
notion of an American chief magistrate. 

It is plain that Mr. Cleveland, like every other man, 
has drawn his character and force in large part from 
his origin and breeding. It would be easy to describe 
him as a man of the people, and he would, I suppose, 
be as proud as any other man of that peculiar American 
title to nobility. But, after all, no man comes from 
the people in general. We are each of us derived from 
some small group of persons in particular; and unless 
we were too poor to have any family life at all, it is 
the life and associations of the family that have chiefly 
shaped us in our youth. Mr. Cleveland had a very 
definite home training: wholesome, kindly, Christian. 
He was bred in a home where character was disci- 
plined and the thoughts were formed, where books 
were read and the right rules of life obeyed. He was 
early thrown, indeed, into the ordinary and common 
school of life, had its rough work thrust upon him, 
and learned, by his own part in it, the life of the peo- 
ple. But he never got those first lessons, conned in 
plain village manses, out of his blood. ‘If mother were 
alive I should feel so much safer,’’ he wrote to his 
brother upon the night he was elected governor of New 
York. Grover Cleveland certainly got good usury in 
his steadfast youth out of the capital stock of energy 


288 COLLEGE AND STATE 


and principle he brought away, as his only portion, from 
his mother and father. 

The qualities which have given him his place in his 
profession and in the history of the country seem com- 
monplace enough in their customary manifestation: 
industry, thoroughness, uprightness, candor, courage. 
But it is worth while to remember that the same force 
and adjustment that will run a toy machine, made for 
a child’s use, will also bring to bear the full might of a 
Corliss engine, with strength enough to drive a city’s 
industries. It is the size and majesty of moral and 
intellectual qualities that make them great; and the 
point the people have noted about Mr. Cleveland is 
that his powers, though of a kind they know and have 
often had experience of, are made upon a great scale, 
and have lifted him to the view of the world as a 
national force, a maker and unmaker of policies. Men 
have said that Mr. Cleveland was without genius or 
brilliancy, because the processes of his mind were cal- 
culable and certain, like a law of nature; that his ut- 
terances were not above the common, because they 
told only in the mass, and not sentence by sentence, 
were cast rather than tempered; that he was stubborn 
because he did not change, and self-opinionated because 
he did not falter. He has made no overtures to for- 
tune; has obtained and holds a great place in our affairs 
by a sort of inevitable mastery, by a law which no 
politician has ever quite understood or at all relished, 
by virtue of a preference which the people themselves 
have expressed without analyzing. We have seen how 
there is genius in mere excellence of gift, and prevail- 
ing power merely in traits of chastened will. 

When a city or a nation looks for a man to better 
its administration, it seeks character rather than gifts 
of origination, a clear purpose that can be depended 
upon to work its will without fear or favor. Mr. Cleve- 
land never struck so straight towards the confidence of 
practical men as when he spoke of the tariff question as 


COLLEGE AND STATE 289 


‘a condition, not a theory.’’ His mind works in the 
concrete; lies close always to the practical life of 
the world, which he understands by virtue of lifelong 
contact with it. He was no prophet of novelties, but 
a man of affairs; had no theories, but strove always 
_to have knowledge of fact. There is as great a field 
for mind in thinking a situation through and through 
as in threading the intricacies of an abstract problem 
and it has heartened men from the first to find that Mr. 
Cleveland could do thinking of that sort with a sure, 
unhurried, steadfast power, such as no less practical 
man could even have simulated. He was an experiment 
when he was chosen mayor of Buffalo, did not know 
his own powers, had given no one else their true meas- 
ure; but he was thereafter a known and calculable force, 
and grew from station to station with an increase of 
vigor, and withal a consistency of growth, which showed 
his qualities such as waited only the invitation of for- 
tune and opportunity. It may be that there are other 
men, of like parts and breeding, who could rise in like 
fashion to a great role, but it is certain that Mr. Cleve- 
land has made a place of his own among the Presi- 
dents of the United States. 

The ordinary rules of politics have been broken 
throughout his career. He came almost like a novice 
into the field of national politics, despite his previous 
experience as mayor and governor. He had always 
identified himself, indeed, with the Democratic party; 
but his neighbors in Buffalo had chosen him to better 
rather than to serve his party, when they elected him 
to local office. He had elevated the office of sheriff, 
when they called him to it, by executing it with con- 
scientious energy and with an enlightened sense of 
public duty; and he had made it his business, when 
they chose him mayor of their city, to see municipal 
affairs put upon a footing of efficiency, such as might 
become a great corporation whose object was the wel- 
fare of its citizens, and no partisan interest whatever. 


290 COLLEGE AND STATE 


It was inevitable that he should shock and alienate all 
mere partisans, alike by his temper and by his methods. 
He called himself a party man, and had no weak stom- 
ach for the processes of party management; but he 
had not sought office as a career, and he deemed his 
party better served by manliness and integrity than 
by chicanery. He was blunt, straightforward, plain- 
spoken, stalwart by nature, used to choosing and push- 
ing his own way; and he had a sober audacity which 
made him no caucus man. His courses of action were in- 
calculable to the mere politician, simply because they 
were not based upon calculation. 

It commonly turns out that the fearlessness of such 
a man is safer than the caution of the professional 
party manager. A free and thoughtful people loves a 
bold man, who faces the fight without too much thought 
of himself or of his party’s fortunes. Mr. Cleveland’s 
success as mayor of Buffalo attracted the attention of 
the whole State,—was too pronounced and conspicuous 
to be overlooked. Party managers saw in him a man 
to win with, little as they understood the elements of 
his power. Even they stared, nevertheless, to see him 
elected governor of the State by the astounding majority 
of 192,854. He evidently had not studied the art of 
pleasing; he had been known as the ‘‘veto mayor” of 
Buffalo, and his vetoes as the “plain speech” vetoes. He 
had an odd way of treating questions of city govern- 
ment as if they were questions of individual official 
judgment, and not at all questions of party advantage. 
He brought his exact habits as a lawyer to bear upon 
his tasks as a public officer, and made a careful busi- 
ness of the affairs of city and State. There was noth- 
ing puritanical about him. He had a robust and prac- 
tical spirit in all things. But he did not seem to regard 
politics as in any way a distinct science, set apart from 
the ordinary business of life. He treated the legislature 
of the State, when he became governor, as he had 
treated the city council of Buffalo, as if he were the 


COLLEGE AND STATE 291 


president of a great industrial concern with incidental 
social functions, and they were its board of directors, 
often unwise, sometimes unscrupulous, in their action; 
as if it were his chief duty to stand between them 
and the stockholders, protecting the latter’s interests 
at all hazards. He used his veto as freely when gov- 
ernor as he had used it when mayor. ‘‘Magnificent,” 
cried the trained politicians about him, under their 
breath,—‘‘magnificent, but it is not politics!” 

And yet they found him thrust inevitably upon them 
as their candidate for President before his term as goy- 
ernor had drawn to its close. Evidence was accumu- 
lating that the country was ready to put an end to 
the long succession of Republican administrations which 
had held the federal executive departments for more 
than twenty years as a sort of party property; but it 
was also plain enough that the old, the real party lead- 
ers among the Democrats would by no means be ac- 
ceptable substitutes. The Democratic party, moreover, 
had been too long in opposition to be ready to assume, 
as it stood, the responsibilities of government. It had 
no real union; it was little more than an assemblage of 
factions, a more or less coherent association of the vari- 
ous groups and interests opposed to the Republicans 
and bent upon breaking their supremacy. It did not 
itself know whether it was of one mind or not. For, 
though popular majorities had been running its way for 
ten years and more, and both Houses of Congress had 
once come into its hands, it had never had leave to 
undertake constructive legislation. The President’s veto 
had stood always in its way, and its legislation had 
often been proposed for effect rather than with a view 
to actual execution. It was necessary it should go 
outside its own confused and disordered ranks if it 
would choose a successful presidential candidate, in or- 
der both to unite its own factions and to win the coun- 
try’s confidence; and so it chose Mr. Cleveland, and 
the country accepted him. 


292 COLLEGE AND STATE 


It was a novel experiment. The very considerations 
that made it wise to nominate Mr. Cleveland as Presi- 
dent were likely to render it difficult to live under his 
presidency with an unbroken party discipline; and the 
circumstances of his election made it all the more prob- 
able that he would choose to be President of the coun- 
try rather than leader of the Democrats. The Demo- 
crats, in fact, did not recognize him as their leader, 
but only as their candidate for the office of President. 
If he was leader at all in the ordinary sense,—if he 
spoke and acted for the views of any body of men,— 
he was the leader of those independent Republicans who 
had broken with their own party, and were looking for 
some one who should open a new era in party politics 
and give them efficient and public-spirited principles 
to believe in and vote for again. Men everywhere 
wished to see parties reform themselves, and old-line 
Democrats had more reason to expect to see their 
party fall apart into its constituent elements once more 
than to hope that Mr. Cleveland would unite and vivify 
it as an aggressive and triumphant organization. He 
had been made President, there was good reason to be- 
lieve, rather because thoughtful men throughout the 
country wanted a pure and businesslike administration | 
than because they wanted Democratic legislation or an 
upsetting of old policies; he had been chosen as a man, 
not as a partisan,—taken up by his own party as a 
likely winner rather than as an acceptable master. 

Apparently there was no reason, however, to fear 
that Mr. Cleveland would arrogate to himself the pre- 
rogatives of political leadership, or assume the role of 
guide and mentor in matters of policy. At first he re- 
garded the great office to which he had been chosen 
as essentially executive, except of course in the giving 
or withholding of his assent to bills passed by Con- 
gress. His veto he used with extraordinary freedom, 
particularly in the disapproval of private pension bills, 
vetoing no less than one hundred and forty-six measures 


COLLEGE AND STATE 293 


during the sessions of the first Congress of his admin- 
istration; and he filled his messages with very definite 
recommendations; but he thought it no part of his 
proper function to press his preferences in any other 
way upon the acceptance of Congress. In the public 
interest, he had addressed a letter to Mr. A. J. Warner, 
a member of Congress, and others, only eight days be- 
fore his inauguration as President, in which he had 
declared in urgent terms his strong conviction that the 
purchase and coinage of silver should be stopped at 
once, to prevent radical and perhaps disastrous dis- 
turbances in the currency; and he joined with Mr. 
Manning, his Secretary of the Treasury, in speaking 
very plainly to the same effect when Congress met. 
But he deemed his duty done when he had thus used 
the only initiative given him by the Constitution, and 
expressly declined to use any other means of pressing 
his views upon his party. He meant to keep aloof, and 
be President with a certain separateness, as the Con- 
stitution seemed to suggest. 

It cost him at least one sharp fight with the Senate 
to carry his purpose of executive independence into 
effect. Mr. Cleveland saw fit to remove certain federal 
officers from office before the expiration of their terms, 
and to appoint Democrats in their places, and the Sen- 
ate demanded the papers which would explain the causes 
of the removals. The President declined to send them, 
holding that the Senate had no right to judge of any- 
thing but the fitness of the men named as successors to 
the officers removed. It was not certain that the 
moral advantage lay with the President. He had been 
put into the presidency chiefly because independent 
voters all over the country, and particularly in his own 
State, regarded him a tried champion of civil service 
reform; but his choice and method in appointments had 
by no means satisfied the reformers. ‘They had stared 
to see him make Mr. Daniel Manning Secretary of the 
Treasury, not because Mr. Manning lacked ability, but 


294 COLLEGE AND STATE 


because he was notoriously a politician of the very 
‘practical’? sort, and seemed to those who did not 
know him the very kind of manager Mr. Cleveland 
ought to have turned his back upon; and they did not 
like any more than the Senate did to see men deprived 
of their offices to make room for Democrats without 
good reason given, reason that had no taint of partisan- 
ship upon it. The truth was that the public service 
had been too long in the hands of the Republicans to 
be susceptible of being considered an unpartisan serv- 
ice as it stood. Mr. Cleveland said simply, to those who 
‘spoke to him in private about the matter, that he had 
not made any removal which he did not, after careful 
inquiry, believe to be for the good of the public service. 
This could not satisfy his critics. It meant that he 
must be permitted to use his judgment not only as a 
man, but also as a Democrat, in reconstructing a civil 
service which had been for a generation in the hands 
of the opposite political party. The laws could not 
be made mandatory upon him in this matter, under the 
Constitution, and he took leave to exercise his discretion 
here and there, as his judgment as a practical and 
strong-willed man suggested. ‘That the operation of 
the laws passed for the reform of the civil service was 
strengthened in the main, and their administration thor- 
oughly organized and very much bettered under him, 
no candid man could deny; and with that he asked the 
country to be content. 

The whole question afforded an excellent opportunity 
for studying Mr. Cleveland’s character. The key 
quality of that character is, perhaps, a sort of robust 
sagacity. He had never for a moment called himself 
anything but a party man. He had not sought personal 
detachment, and had all along known the weakness that 
would come with isolation and the absolute rejection 
of the regular means of party management; and he had 
dared to make his own choices in cases which seemed 
too subtle or exceptional for the law. It was unsafe 


COLLEGE AND STATE 295 


ground often; blunders were made which appeared to 
defeat the purposes he had in view in making removals 
and appointments; it looked in the end as if it would 
have been wiser to make no exceptions at all to the 
ordinary rules of appointment: but the mistakes were 
those of a strong nature,—too strong to strip itself 
absolutely of such choice as might serve what was to 
him legitimate party strength. Who shall judge the 
acts in question who does not know the grounds upon 
which the President proceeded? Not all of govern- 
ment can be crowded into the rules of the law. 

At any rate, criticism did not disturb Mr. Cleve- 
land’s serenity; and it pleased the fancy of men of all 
sorts to see the President bear himself so steadfastly 
and do his work so calmly in the midst of all the talk. 
Outsiders could not know whether the criticism cut or 
not; they only knew that the President did not falter 
or suffer his mind to be shaken. He had an enormous 
capacity for work, shirked no detail of his busy func- 
tion, carried the government steadily upon his shoul- 
ders. There is no antidote for worry to be compared 
with hard labor at important tasks which keep the mind 
stretched to large views; and the President looked upon 
himself as the responsible executive of the nation, not 
as the arbiter of policies. [here is something in such 
a character that men of quick and ardent thought can- 
not like or understand. They want all capable men 
to be thinking, like themselves, along lines of active ad- 
vance; they are impatient of performance which is sim- 
ply thorough without also being regenerative, and Mr. 
Cleveland has not commended himself to them. They 
themselves would probably not make good Presidents. 
A certain tough and stubborn fibre is necessary, which 
does not easily change, which is unelastically strong. 

The attention of the country, however, was presently 
drawn off from Mr. Cleveland’s pension vetoes and 
individual methods of appointment, from his attitude 
and temper as a power standing aloof from Congress, 


296 COLLEGE AND STATE 


to note him a leader and master after all, as if in spite 
of himself. He was too good a Democrat and too 
strenuous a man of business to stand by and see the 
policy of the country hopelessly adrift without putting 
his own influence to the test to direct it. He could not 
keep to his role of simple executive. He saw his party 
cut into opposing factions upon the question of the 
tariff, upon the reform to which it had been pledged 
time out of mind. Mr. Carlisle, who wished to see 
the tariff brought to a revenue basis, was Speaker of the 
Democratic House, and Mr. Morrison was chairman of 
the Committee of Ways and Means; but Mr. Randall 
checkmated them at every turn, and nothing was done 
to redeem the party’s promises. No man of strong 
convictions could stand there, where all the country 
watched him, waiting for him to speak, the only rep- 
resentative of the nation as a whole in all the govern- 
ment, and let a great opportunity and a great duty go 
by default. He had intended to make his a strictly 
business administration, to cleanse the public service 
and play his assigned part in legislation with a clear 
judgment to do right. But the President stands at the 
centre of legislation as well as of administration in 
executing his great office, and Mr. Cleveland grew to 
the measure of his place as its magnitude and responsi- 
bilities cleared to his view. ‘The breath of affairs was 
at last in his lungs, and he gave his party a leader, 
of a sudden, in the plain-spoken, earnest, mandatory 
tariff message of December, 1887. It was such a stroke 
as no mere politician would have hazarded, and it 
sadly disconcerted the men who had supposed them- 
selves the leaders of the Democrats. Mr. Cleveland 
had not consulted them about his manifesto. He had 
made the issue of the next presidential campaign for 
them before they were aware of it, and that campaign 
was immediately at hand. The Congress to which he 
sent his messages showed already a sad cutting off in 
the ranks of the Democrats. In the first Congress of 


COLLEGE AND STATE 297 


his administration his party had had a majority of 
close upon forty in the House, though the Senate was 
still against them. In the Congress of which he de- 
manded tariff reform the Democratic majority in the 
House had dwindled to eleven, though the Senate was 
almost equally divided. It seemed as if he would com- 
mit his party to a dangerous and aggressive policy at 
the very moment when its power was on the decline, 
and risk everything with regard to the next choice of 
President. Some resented his action as a sudden usurpa- 
tion; others doubted what they should think; a few took 
the changed aspect of politics with zest and relish. It 
was bravely done. ‘The situation produced was even 
dramatic; and yet the calmest man anywhere touched 
by the business was Mr. Cleveland himself. It was 
no trick or impulse. It was the steadily delivered 
blow of a stalwart and thoughtful man, thoroughly sick 
of seeing a great party drift and dally while the na- 
tion’s finances suffered waste and demoralization. 

He had certainly settled the way the next campaign 
should go: that the country’s reception of his message 
showed; and the politicians adjusted themselves as best 
they might to his policy of plain speech and no circum- 
spection. The House passed a tariff measure, drafted 
by Mr. Mills, which was thrown aside in the Senate, 
but not rejected by the party. Mr. Cleveland was re- 
nominated for the presidency by acclamation, not be- 
cause the politicians wanted him, but because their 
constituents did. The two parties went to the country, 
and Mr. Cleveland lost by the vote of his own State. 

The odd thing about it was that defeat did not seem 
to lessen Mr. Cleveland’s importance. Some persons 
did not like to see their ex-President return to the 
ordinary duties of legal practice, as he did in New York, 
apparently expecting a healthy, practical man to accept 
a merely ornamental part in society after once having 
been their chief magistrate. There was no denying 
the fact that he had wrought his own defeat and his 


298 COLLEGE AND STATE 


party’s by forcing a hot fight when matters were going 
peacefully enough. He himself kept as much as might 
be from unnecessary publicity. But the country could 
not cease to be interested in him, and he was the only 
man it would take seriously, even now, as the leader 
of the Democrats. Practical men could not for the 
life of them think of any more suitable candidate for 
the next campaign. Whether he had united or pleased 
his party or not, he had, in any case, given it a pro- 
gramme and made himself its chief representative. 
Through all the four years of Mr. Harrison’s admin- 
istration Mr. Cleveland was the most conspicuous man 
in the country out of office, and a sort of popular ex- 
pectation followed him in all his movements. 

The Republicans, moreover, delivered themselves 
into his hands. They took his defeat as a mandate 
from the people to make a tariff as little like that which 
Mr. Cleveland had desired as it might be possible to 
construct. The Committee of Ways and Means, of 
which Major McKinley was chairman, framed a meas- 
ure unmistakably fit to meet the demand; and the con- 
gressional elections of 1890 went overwhelmingly 
against the Republicans. Apparently, the country had 
come at last to Mr. Cleveland’s mind in respect of the 
tariff, and he became once more the logical as well as 
the popular candidate of the Democrats for the presi- 
dency. Once more he became President, and essayed 
the difficult role of leader of a composite party. He 
had created an additional difficulty, meanwhile, obeying 
an imperative conviction without regard to policy or 
opportune occasion. He had ventured a frank public 
letter in opposition to the free coinage of silver, not- 
withstanding the fact that he knew free coinage to be 
much more distinctively a Democratic than a Republi- 
can measure. ‘The habit of independent initiative in 
respect of questions of legislative policy was growing 
upon him, as he felt his personal power grow and his 
familiarity with public questions; and he knew that 


COLLEGE AND STATE 299 


he was striking straight home, this time, to the confi- 
dence, at any rate, of every enlightened man of busi- 
ness in the country. Such men he had known from his 
youth up, and could assess: his courage and self-confi- 
dence in such a case was stuff of his whole training and 
character, and he felt that he could afford to lose the 
presidency upon that issue. 

Mr. Cleveland’s second term has shown the full 
strength and the full risk of the qualities which, dur- 
ing his first administration, the country had seen dis- 
played only in the disturbing tariff message of 1887, 
in his energetic treatment of the fisheries question, 
which the Senate did not like, and in certain appoint- 
ments which the whole country had criticised. He 
gave warning at the outset of the individual role he 
meant to play in the selection of his Cabinet. He be- 
stowed the secretaryship of state upon a man come but 
the other day out of the Republican ranks to support 
him; the secretaryship of war upon a man who had 
formerly been his private secretary; the post-office upon 
his one-time law partner; the department of the in- 
terior upon a Georgian whose name the country smiled 
to hear for the first time; the attorney-generalship upon 
a lawyer who was no politician; and the secretaryship of 
agriculture upon a quiet gentleman of his own picking 
out. Only the navy and the headship of the treasury 
went to men whom his party knew and followed in the 
House. His first Cabinet had contained men whom 
everybody knew as accredited leaders among the Demo- 
crats—Mr. Bayard, Mr. Whitney, Mr. Lamar, Mr. 
Vilas; only the minority of his counsellors had then 
been selected as if to please himself, rather than to 
draw a party following about him by recognizing the 
men who exercised authority among the Democrats. 
But his second Cabinet seemed chosen as if of deliber- 
ate and set purpose to make a personal and private 
choice, without regard to party support. 

And yet there was less difference between the two 


300 COLLEGE AND STATE 


Cabinets than appeared upon the surface. Though 
there had been some representative Democrats in the 
first Cabinet, they had not been men who controlled 
their party. Mr. Carlisle, of the second Cabinet, was 
undoubtedly more influential than any of them, and 
Mr. Herbert more truly a working, capital member 
oi the party’s force in the House. The truth was that 
Mr. Cleveland had, throughout his first administration, 
been all the while held at arm’s length by his party,— 
an ally, perhaps, but not a partner in its undertakings,— 
had been compelled to keep the place of separateness 
and independence which had at first seemed to be his 
choice. In his second administration he apparently made 
no effort to force his way into its counsels, but ac- 
cepted his place as the independent voters’ President, — 
content if only he could have a personal following, carry 
out the real pledges of his party, and make his purpose 
felt as the nation’s spokesman. Not that he broke with 
his party either in thought or in purpose; but he saw 
that it would not take counsel with him, and that, if he 
would fulfill his trust, he must force partisan leaders, 
for their own good, to feel his power from without. 
It might be they would draw about him more readily 
through mastery than through persuasion. 

It was singular how politics began at once to centre 
in the President, waiting for his initiative, and how the 
air at Washington filled with murmurs against the 
domineering and usurping temper and practice of the 
Executive. Power had somehow gone the length of 
the avenue, and seemed lodged in one man. No one 
who knew Mr. Cleveland, or who judged him fairly, 
for a moment deemed him too covetous of authority, 
or in any degree disregardful of the restraints the Con- 
stitution has put upon the President. But the Demo- 
crats in the House were made conscious that the eye 
of the country had been withdrawn from them in mat- 
ters of policy, and Washington seemed full of Mr. 
Cleveland, his Secretary of the Treasury and his Sec- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 301 


retary of State. A position of personal isolation had 
been thrust upon him, but he used the power which 
had come to him to effect the purposes to which, as a 
Democrat, he felt himself pledged. If the party would 
not act with him, he must act for it. There was no 
touch of cant in him when he declared his allegiance to 
the Democratic party; there was only a danger that 
if the leaders of the party in Congress continued to fol- 
low him merely when they were obliged, he would him- 
self presently be all the Democratic party that was 
left in the country. 

On June 30, 1893, four months after his second 
inauguration, he took steps to force action upon the 
silver question. He called Congress to meet in extra 
session upon the 7th of August following, to deal with 
the finances of the country and prevent a panic; tell- 
ing them plainly that the law which compelled the pur- 
chase and coinage of silver by the government ought 
to be repealed, and that this question must be settled 
even if the tariff had to wait. There was already seri- 
ous disturbance in business circles, arising in large part 
from the condition of the currency, when, on the 26th 
of June, the British authorities in India closed the 
mints of that country to the free coinage of silver, and 
sent the price of the unstable metal down with a dis- 
astrous tumble in all the world’s markets. It looked 
then as if there would certainly be a fatal panic, and 
Mr. Cleveland saw that Congress must meet and face 
the situation at once. 

It was evident, even before Congress came together, 
that the battle was to be, not between Democrats and 
Republicans, but between the advocates and the op- 
ponents of the free coinage of silver, without regard to 
party. Conventions called by the silver men met in 
Denver and in Chicago before Congress assembled, and 
denounced the proposal to repeal the silver purchase 
law as a scheme devised by American and English 
bankers, with the assistance of Mr. Cleveland, to drive 


302 COLLEGE AND STATE 


silver out of use as money; and when Congress took 
the matter up, old party lines seemed, for the mo- 
ment at any rate, to have disappeared. It was the 
“friends” of silver against its ‘‘enemies.” ‘The advo- 
cates of Mr. Cleveland’s policy of repeal won a de- 
cisive victory in the House of Representatives, and 
won it at once, before August was out; but in the Sen- 
ate the fight dragged with doubtful and wavering for- 
tunes, until the very end of October,—would have 
ended in some weak compromise had not the President 
stood resolute,—and kept the country waiting so long 
for the issue that business suffered almost as much as 
if repeal had been defeated. 

It was the President’s victory that the law was at 
last repealed, and every one knew it. He had forced 
the consideration of the question; he had told Senators 
plainly, almost passionately, when they approached him, 
that he would accept no compromise,—that he would 
veto anything less than absolute repeal, and let them 
face the country as best they might afterwards. Until 
he came on the stage both parties had dallied and co- 
quetted with the advocates of silver. Now he had 
brought both to a parting of the ways. The silver men 
were forced to separate themselves and look their situ- 
ation in the face, choose which party they should plan 
to bring under their will and policy, if they could, and 
no longer camp in the tents of both. Such a stroke 
settled what the course of congressional politics should 
be throughout the four years of Mr. Cleveland’s term, 
and made it certain that at the end of that term he 
should either have won his party to himself or lost it 
altogether. It was evident that any party that re- 
jected the gold standard for the currency must look 
upon him as its opponent. 

He showed his fixed purpose in the matter once again 
by his veto of the so-called Seigniorage Bill in March, 
1894. The silver men had already so far rallied as 
to induce substantial majorities in both Houses to agree 


COLLEGE AND STATE 303 


to the practically immediate coinage of all the silver 
bullion owned by the treasury as a result of the pur- 
chases of silver made under the law which had but just 
now been repealed in the special session. It would 
not be wise to put forth so great a body of silver, at 
such a time, to the fresh disturbance of the currency, 
said the President, and the bill was negatived. The issue 
of more silver was defeated, and the silver men quietly 
set about forming their party lines anew. 

Meanwhile, issue was joined once more upon the 
question of the tariff, not only as between Democrats 
and Republicans, but also as between Democrat and 
Democrat, and new lines of divergence were run through 
Mr. Cleveland’s party. The Committee of Ways and 
Means, of which Mr. W. L. Wilson was chairman, had 
formulated a tariff bill during the special session, and 
when Congress came together for its regular sittings 
they added to their tariff scheme a bill providing for 
an income tax, to meet the probable deficiency in the 
revenue likely to result from the reduction of import 
duties which they had proposed. The two measures 
were made one. There was keen opposition in the 
East to the adoption of the income tax, and though 
the composite bill went through the House by a ma- 
jority of sixty-four, many Democrats voted against it, 
and party lines were again broken. In the Senate, the 
tariff bill was changed beyond recognition by more than 
six hundred amendments. Many of the ad valorem 
duties proposed by Mr. Wilson’s committee were made 
specific; the Senate would not consent to put iron and 
lead ores or coal upon the free list with wool; above all, 
it insisted upon an increase rather than a reduction of 
the duty on sugar. In the Committee of Conference, 
irreconcilable differences of opinion emerged between 
the two Houses; a letter from Mr. Cleveland to Mr. 
Wilson, supporting the plans of the House and severely 
criticising those of the Senate, only stiffened a little 
more the temper of the Senate conferees; and the House 


304 COLLEGE AND STATE 


at last yielded, rather than have no change at all in 
the tariff. 

Mr. Cleveland did not sign the bill, but suffered it 
to become law without his signature. It was not such 
a law as he wanted, he said, nor such a law as ful- 
filled the pledges of the party; but the party had ac- 
cepted it, and he would not cast himself loose from 
it in this critical matter by the use of his veto. No one 
believed that the Senators who had insisted upon the 
chief matter of contention, the change in the sugar 
duties, had acted as Democrats. It was the universal 
opinion that they had acted as the representatives of 
a particular vested interest. But in the nice balance 
of parties which existed in the Senate they were in a 
position to dictate. The party leaders in the House 
thought it better to pass some measure of tariff re- 
form than to suffer a total miscarriage; and Mr. Cleve- 
land tacitly consented to their judgment. 

The Supreme Court completed the discomfiture of 
the party by declaring the income tax law unconstitu- 
tional. Without that tax there was not revenue enough 
to meet the expenditures of the government, as pres- 
ently became evident. Deficiency of revenue, coupled 
with the obligation of the government to redeem its 
notes in gold on demand, cut into the gold reserve, and 
the money question grew acute again. To maintain the 
gold reserve the administration was obliged again and 
again to resort to the issue of bonds. The President 
was in league, the silver men said, with the bankers 
and the men who controlled the gold of the world 
everywhere. Mr. Carlisle earnestly urged a radical re- 
form of the currency system: the repeal of the law com- 
pelling a constant reissue of the government’s legal 
tender notes, and such legislation as would make pro- 
vision for a sufficiently elastic currency by means of 
liberal changes in the banking laws. But his plans 
were not acted upon; the revenue did not increase; .the 
government was obliged to pay out gold, upon demand, 


COLLEGE AND STATE 305 


from its reserve; and there was nothing for it but to 
obtain gold of the bankers, and of those who had 
hoarded it, by issuing new bonds and increasing the in- 
terest charges of the government. ‘The silver men 
grew every day more hostile to the administration. 

The administration bulked very large the while, not 
only in the business world, but also in the field of for- 
eign affairs. A treaty providing for the annexation 
of Hawaii was pending in the Senate when Mr. Cleve- 
land came into office in March, 1893; but Mr. Cleve- 
land promptly withdrew it, and, in characteristic fash- 
ion, set about finding out for himself the real situation 
of affairs in the islands. The outcome showed his trans- 
parent honesty and rare courage very plainly, if not 
his skill in a delicate affair. He found that it was the 
countenance and apparent assistance of the agent of 
the United States in Hawaii that had facilitated the 
dethronement of the Queen and the setting up of a 
revolutionary government, and he took steps to undo 
so far as possible the mischievous work of interference. 
The apologies of the United States were made to the 
Queen, and the provisional government was informed 
that the government of the United States would expect 
it to withdraw and make way for the reéstablishment 
of the legitimate government of the islands. But the 
provisional government refused to withdraw, and the 
President was obliged to submit the whole matter to 
Congress, without whose sanction he did not feel justi- 
fied in employing force or in taking any further step 
in the unhappy affair. It seemed a lame ending, and 
the papers found it easy to scoff, though hard to say 
what other honorable course could have been taken; 
and every man who was not a Jingo perceived that the 
President had not in fact lost credit. He had simply 
followed his conscience without regard to applause or 
failure, and given one more proof of his unsophisticated 
character. 

At any rate, everybody forgot Hawaii upon the 


306 COLLEGE AND STATE 


emergence of Venezuela. Diplomatic relations had been 
suspended between Great Britain and Venezuela because 
of a dispute regarding the boundary line between Vene- 
zuela and British Guiana, and Mr. Cleveland’s admin- 
istration had intervened, and had insisted that the whole 
question be submitted to arbitration. ‘The position it 
took was based explicitly upon the Monroe Doctrine, 
and the course it proposed was virtually a demand that 
the United States be accorded the right of intervention 
in all questions arising between South American states 
and European powers. Lord Salisbury declined to make 
any such concession to the United States, or to submit 
any more of the question between Great Britain and 
Venezuela to arbitration than he had already expressed 
his willingness to submit to adjudication in his corre- 
spondence with the Venezuelan government; and Mr. 
Cleveland sent to Congress his startling message of De- 
cember 17, 1895. 

Here again he showed himself a strong man, but 
no diplomatist. It was like a blunt, candid, fearless man 
to say that it was the duty of the United States to ascer- 
tain for herself the just rights of Venezuela, and resist 
any encroachment upon her southern neighbor by every 
means in her power, and to add that he fully realized 
the consequences that might follow such a declaration 
of purpose. But only our kinsmen oversea would have 
yielded anything or sought peace by concession, after 
such words had been spoken. England presently showed 
that she would not have taken such a defiance from 
William of Germany; but good feeling, good temper, 
good sense, soon brought the two governments to a 
better understanding. Our commission of inquiry acted 
with the utmost sobriety and tact; Mr. Olney pursued 
his correspondence with Lord Salisbury with a strength 
of good manners, good reasoning, and disinterested pur- 
pose that carried its own assurance of victory; we had 
in Mr. Bayard a representative in London of an old and 
excellent school of behavior; and the end was a diplo- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 307 


matic triumph for the United States which attracted 
the attention of the world. The successful settlement 
of the particular question in controversy was even fol- 
lowed by a treaty of general arbitration between Eng- 
land and the United States, such as multitudes of peace- 
loving men had prayed for, but few had dared to hope 
to see. What had at first seemed to threaten to mar Mr. 
Cleveland’s fame once and for all turned out in the end 
its greatest title to honorable dignity. We are at last 
enabled to read the famous message aright. ‘There 
spoke a man as desirous and capable of peace and mod- 
eration as any in the nation, but accustomed, when he 
spoke at all, to speak his whole mind without reserve, 
and willing to speak to Europe, if she must hear, as 
freely as he would speak to his own people. It was the 
perilous indiscretion of a frank nature incapable of dis- 
guises. 

The Cuban question has shown us the same man. He 
has satisfied neither the Democrats nor the Republicans, 
because neither cared to observe the restraints of inter- 
national law or set themselves any bounds of prudence; 
but he has made Spain feel the pressure of our opinion 
and of our material interest in the Cuban struggle none 
the less, and by his very self-restraint has brought the 
sad business sensibly nearer to its end. 

In this, as in other things, he has been a man without 
a party. His friends have been the silent men who 
watch public affairs without caring too much about the 
fortunes of parties. He has carried civil service reform 
to its completion at last; but that did not give him a 
party. To extend the rules of the classified merit ser- 
vice to all branches of the public business was a work 
of non-partisanship, and no man need expect a party 
following because of that. Mr. Cleveland did not do 
this work hurriedly. At the close of his first adminis- 
tration the friends of reform stood disappointed and 
not a little disheartened. But he has done the work in 
his own way and thoroughly, and no man need doubt 


308 COLLEGE AND STATE 


his record now. He can look back with deep satisfac- 
tion upon the fact that while he directed the affairs of 
the government vast tracts of the public lands were 
reclaimed for the use of the people; that he was enabled 
to put system and a little economy into the management 
of the Pension Bureau; that more than one of the execu- 
tive departments has received a complete reorganiza- 
tion at his hands; that he gave the country the business- 
like administration he promised. None of these things, 
however, secures any man the support of a party. Mr. 
Cleveland never seemed so utterly without a party as 
in the extraordinary campaign which has made Mr. Mc- 
Kinley his successor. But it is the country’s debt to him 
now that he thus stood alone. He forced the fight 
which drove the silver men to their final struggle for a 
party. [hey chose the Democratic party, because it 
was strong in the West where the silver ore was mined, 
and in the South and in all the agricultural areas of the 
continent where those business interests are weak which 
most sensitively feel the movements of the money 
market. They drove thousands of men out of the Dem- 
ocratic party when they took it,—Mr. Cleveland, their 
chief enemy, with the rest. And the Republicans routed 
them upon the issue which Mr. Cleveland had made 
definite and final. 

We need not pretend to know what history shall say 
of Mr. Cleveland; we need not pretend that we can 
draw any common judgment of the man from the con- 
fused cries that now ring everywhere from friend and 
foe. We know only that he has played a great part; 
that his greatness is authenticated by the passion of 
love and of hatred he has stirred up; that no such 
great personality has appeared in our politics since Lin- 
coln; and that, whether greater or less, his personality 
is his own, unique in all the varied history of our goy- 
ernment. He has made policies and altered parties 
after the fashion of an earlier age in our history, and 


COLLEGE AND STATE 309 


the men who assess his fame in the future will be no 
partisans, but men who love candor, courage, honesty, 


strength, unshaken capacity, and high purpose such as 
his. 


THE MAKING OF THE NATION 


FROM THE “ATLANTIC MONTHLY,” JULY, 1897, VOL. 
LXXX, PP. I-14. 


| RR making of our own nation seems to have taken 
place under our very eyes, so recent and so familiar 
is the story. The great process was worked out in the 
plain and open day of the modern world, statesmen and 
historians standing by to superintend, criticise, make 
record of what was done. ‘The stirring narrative runs 
quickly into the day in which we live; we can say that 
our grandfathers builded the government which now 
holds so large a place in the world; the story seems of 
yesterday, and yet seems entire, as if the making of 
the republic had hastened to complete itself within a 
single hundred years. We are elated to see so great 
a thing done upon so great a scale, and to feel ourselves 
in so intimate a way actors in the moving scene. | 
Yet we should deceive ourselves were we to suppose 
the work done, the nation made. We have been told 
by a certain group of our historians that a nation was 
made when the federal Constitution was adopted; that 
the strong sentences of the law sufficed to transform us 
from a league of States into a people single and insepa- 
rable. Some tell us, however, that it was not till the 
War of 1812 that we grew fully conscious of a single 
purpose and destiny, and began to form policies as if 
foranation. Others see the process complete only when 
the civil war struck slavery away, and gave North and 
South a common way of life that should make common 
ideals and common endeavors at last possible. Then, 
when all have had their say, there comes a great move- 
ment like the one which we call Populism, to remind us 
310 


COLLEGE AND STATE 311 


how the country still lies apart in sections: some at one 
stage of development, some at another; some with one 
hope and purpose for America, some with another. 
And we ask ourselves, Is the history of our making as 
a nation indeed over, or do we still wait upon the forces 
that shall at last unite us? Are we even now, in fact, 
a nation? 

Clearly, it is not a question of sentiment, but a ques- 
tion of fact. If it be true that the country, taken as a 
whole, is at one and the same time in several stages 
of development,—not a great commercial and manufac- 
turing nation, with here and there its broad pastures 
and the quiet farms from which it draws its food; not 
a vast agricultural community, with here and there its 
ports of shipment and its necessary marts of exchange; 
nor yet a country of mines, merely, pouring their prod- 
ucts forth into the markets of the world, to take thence 
whatever it may need for its comfort and convenience 
in living,—we still wait for its economic and spiritual 
union. It is many things at once. Sections big enough 
for kingdoms live by agriculture, and farm the wide 
stretches of a new land by the aid of money borrowed 
from other sections which seem almost like another 
nation, with their teeming cities, dark with the smoke 
of factories, quick with the movements of trade, as sen- 
sitive to the variations of exchange on London as to the 
variations in the crops raised by their distant fellow 
countrymen on the plains within the continent. Upon 
cther great spaces of the vast continent, communities, 
millions strong, live the distinctive life of the miner, 
have all their fortune bound up and centred in a single 
group of industries, feel in their utmost concentration 
the power of economic forces elsewhere dispersed, and 
chafe under the unequal yoke that unites them with 
communities so unlike themselves as those which 
lend and trade and manufacture, and those which 
follow the plough and reap the grain that is to feed 
the world. 


S12 COLLEGE AND STATE 


Such contrasts are nothing new in our history, and 
our system of government is admirably adapted to re- 
lieve the strain and soften the antagonism they might 
entail. All our national history through our country 
has lain apart in sections, each marking a stage of settle- 
ment, a stage of wealth, a stage of development, as popu- 
lation has advanced, as if by successive journeyings and 
encampments, from east to west; and always new re- 
gions have been suffered to become new States, form 
their own life under their own law, plan their own econ- 
omy, adjust their own domestic relations, and legalize 
their own methods of business. States have, indeed, 
often been whimsically enough formed. We have left 
the matter of boundaries to surveyors rather than to 
statesmen, and have by no means managed to construct 
economic units in the making of States. We have joined 
mining communities with agricultural, the mountain with 
the plain, the ranch with the farm, and have left the 
making of uniform rules to the sagacity and practicak 
habit of neighbors ill at ease with one another. But 
on the whole, the scheme, though a bit haphazard, has 
worked itself out with singularly little friction and no 
disaster, and the strains of the great structure we have 
erected have been greatly eased and dissipated. 

Elastic as the system is, however, it stiffens at every 
point of national policy. The federal government can 
make but one rule, and that a rule for the whole coun- 
try, in each act of its legislation. Its very Constitution 
withholds it from discrimination as between State and 
State, section and section; and yet its chief powers touch 
just those subjects of economic interest in which the 
several sections of the country feel themselves most 
unlike. Currency questions do not affect them equally 
or in the same way. Some need an elastic currency to 
serve their uses; others can fill their coffers more 
readily with a currency that is inelastic. Some can build 
up manufactures under a tariff law; others cannot, and 
must submit to pay more without earning more. Some 


COLLEGE AND STATE 313 


have one interest in a principle of interstate commerce; 
others, another. It would be difficult to find even a 
question of foreign policy which would touch all parts 
of the country alike. A foreign fleet would mean much 
more to the merchants of Boston and New York than to 
the merchants of Illinois and the farmers of the 
Dakotas. 

The conviction is becoming painfully distinct among 
us, moreover, that these contrasts of condition and dif- 
ferences of interest between the several sections of the 
country are now more marked and emphasized than 
they ever were before. The country has been trans- 
formed within a generation, not by any creations in a 
new kind, but by stupendous changes in degree. Every 
interest has increased its scale and its individual signifi- 
cance. The ‘“‘East’’ is transformed by the vast accumu- 
lations of wealth made since the civil war,—transformed 
from a simple to a complex civilization, more like the 
Old World than like the New. The ‘West’ has so 
magnified its characteristics by sheer growth, every 
economic interest which its life represents has become 
sO gigantic in its proportions, that it seems to Eastern 
men, and to its own people also, more than ever a region 
apart. It is true that the ‘“‘West” is not, as a matter 
of fact, a region at all, but, in Professor Turner’s 
admirable phrase, a stage of development, nowhere 
set apart and isolated, but spread abroad through all 
the far interior of the continent. But it is now a stage 
of development with a difference, as Professor Turner 
has shown, which makes it practically a new thing in 
our history. The ‘West’? was once a series of States 
and settlements beyond which lay free lands not yet 
occupied, into which the restless and all who could not 
thrive by mere steady industry, all who had come too 
late and all who had stayed too long, could pass on, and, 
it might be, better their fortunes. Now it lies without 
outlet. The free lands are gone. New communities 

* American Historical Review, vol. i. p. 71. 


314 COLLEGE AND STATE 


must make their life sufficient without this easy escape, 
—must study economy, find their fortunes in what lies 
at hand, intensify effort, increase capital, build up a 
future out of details. It is as if they were caught in 
a fixed order of life and forced into a new competition, 
and both their self-consciousness and their keenness to 
observe every point of self-interest are enlarged beyond 
former example. 

That there are currents of national life, both strong 
and definite, running in full tide through all the conti- 
nent from sea to sea, no observant person can fail to 
perceive,—currents which have long been gathering 
force, and which cannot now be withstood. ‘There need 
be no fear in any sane man’s mind that we shall ever 
again see our national government threatened with over- 
throw by any power which our own growth has bred. 
The temporary danger is that, not being of a common 
mind, because not living under common conditions, the 
several sections of the country, which a various economic 
development has for the time being set apart and con- 
trasted, may struggle for supremacy in the control of 
the government, and that we may learn by some sad 
experience that there is not even yet any common stand- 
ard, either of opinion or of policy, underlying our 
national life. The country is of one mind in its allegi- 
ance to the government and in its attachment to the 
national idea; but it is not yet of one mind in respect 
of that fundamental question, What policies will best 
serve us in giving strength and development to our life? 
Not the least noteworthy of the incidents that preceded 
and foretokened the civil war was, if I may so call it, 
the sectionalization of the national idea. Southern 
merchants bestirred themselves to get conventions to- 
gether for the discussion, not of the issues of politics, 
but of the economic interests of the country. ‘Their 
thought and hope were of the nation. They spoke no 
word of antagonism against any section or interest. Yet 
it was plain in every resolution they uttered that for 


COLLEGE AND STATE 315 


them the nation was one thing and centred in the South, 
while for the rest of the country the nation was an- 
other thing and lay in the North and Northwest. They 
were arguing the needs of the nation from the needs 
of their own section. The same thing had happened in 
the days of the embargo and the War of 1812. The 
Hartford Convention thought of New England when 
it spoke of the country. So must it ever be when sec- 
tion differs from section in the very basis and method of 
its life. ‘The nation is to-day one thing in Kansas, and 
quite another in Massachusetts. 

There is no longer any danger of a civil war. There 
was war between the South and the rest of the nation 
because their differences were removable in no other 
way. here was no prospect that slavery, the root of 
those differences, would ever disappear in the mere 
process of growth. It was to be apprehended, on the 
contrary, that the very processes of growth would inevi- 
tably lead to the extension of slavery and the perpetua- 
tion of radical social and economic contrasts and antag- 
onisms between State and State, between region and 
region. An heroic remedy was the only remedy. Slavery 
being removed, the South is now joined with the “West,” 
joined with it in a stage of development, as a region 
chiefly agricultural, without diversified industries, with- 
out a multifarious trade, without those subtle extended 
nerves which come with all-round economic develop- 
ment, and which make men keenly sensible of the in- 
terests that link the world together, as it were into 
a single community. But these are lines of difference 
which will be effaced by mere growth, which time will 
calmly ignore. “They make no boundaries for armies 
to cross. Tide-water Virginia was thus separated once 
from her own population within the Alleghany valleys, 
—held two jealous sections within her own limits. Mas- 
sachusetts once knew the sharp divergences of interest 
and design which separated the coast settlements upon 
the Bay from the restless pioneers who had taken up the 


316 COLLEGE AND STATE 


free lands of her own western counties. North Caro- 
lina was once a comfortable and indifferent ‘‘East” to 
the uneasy ‘‘West” that was to become Tennessee. 
Virginia once seemed old and effete to Kentucky. The 
“great West’? once lay upon the Ohio, but has since 
disappeared there, overlaid by the changes which have 
carried the conditions of the ‘East’ to the Great 
Lakes and beyond. There has never yet been a time 
in our history when we were without an ‘‘East” and 
a “West,” but the novel day when we shall be without 
them is now in sight. As the country grows it will in- 
evitably grow homogeneous. Population will not hence- 
forth spread, but compact; for there is no new land 
between the seas where the ‘‘West” can find another 
lodgment. ‘The conditions which prevail in the ever 
widening ‘‘East” will sooner or later cover the conti- 
nent, and we shall at last be one people. The process 
will not be a short one. It will doubtless run through 
many generations and involve many a critical question 
of statesmanship. But it cannot be stayed, and its 
working out will bring the nation to its final character 
and role in the world. 

In the meantime, shall we not constantly recall our 
reassuring past, reminding one another again and again, 
as our memories fail us, of the significant incidents of 
the long journey we have already come, in order that 
we may be cheered and guided upon the road we have 
yet to choose and follow? It is only by thus attempt- 
ing, and attempting again and again, some sufficient 
analysis of our past experiences that we can form any 
adequate image of our life as a nation, or acquire any 
intelligent purpose to guide us amidst the rushing move- 
ment of affairs. It is no doubt in part by reviewing our 
lives that we shape and determine them. ‘The future 
will not, indeed, be like the past; of that we may rest 
assured. It cannot be like it in detail; it cannot even 
resemble it in the large. It is one thing to fill a fertile 
continent with a vigorous people and take first posses- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 317 


sion of its treasures; it is quite another to complete the 
work of occupation and civilization in detail. Big 
plans, thought out only in the rough, will suffice for 
the one, but not for the other. A provident leadership, 
a patient tolerance of temporary but unavoidable evils, 
a just temper of compromise and accommodation, a 
hopeful industry in the face of small returns, mutual 
understandings, and a cordial spirit of codperation are 
needed for the slow intensive task, which were not de- 
manded amidst the free advances of an unhampered 
people from settlement to settlement. And yet the past 
has made the present, and will make the future. It has 
made us a nation, despite a variety of life that threat- 
ened to keep us at odds amongst ourselves. It has 
shown us the processes by which differences have been 
obliterated and antagonisms softened. It has taught 
us how to become strong, and will teach us, if we heed 
its moral, how to become wise, also, and single-minded. 

The colonies which formed the Union were brought 
together, let us first remind ourselves, not merely be- 
cause they were neighbors and kinsmen, but because they 
were forced to see that they had common interests 
which they could serve in no other way. ‘There is 
nothing which binds one country or one State to another 
but interest,” said Washington. ‘Without this cement 
the Western inhabitants can have no predilection for 
us.” Without that cement the colonies could have had 
no predilection for one another. But it is one thing 
to have common interests, and quite another to perceive 
them and act uponthem. The colonies were first thrust 
together by the pressure of external danger. They 
needed one another, as well as aid from oversea, as any 
fool could perceive, if they were going to keep their 
frontiers against the Indians, and their outlets upon 
the Western waters from the French. The French and 
Indian War over, that pressure was relieved, and they 
might have fallen apart again, indifferent to any com- 
mon aim, unconscious of any common interest, had not 


318 COLLEGE AND STATE 


the government that was their common master set itself 
to make them wince under common wrongs. Then it 
was that they saw how like they were in polity and life 
and interest in the great field of politics, studied their 
common liberty, and became aware of their common 
ambitions. It was then that they became aware, too, 
that their common ambitions could be realized only by 
union; not single-handed, but united against a common 
enemy. Had they been let alone, it would have taken 
many a long generation of slowly increased acquaintance 
with one another to apprise them of their kinship in 
life and interests and institutions; but England drove 
them into immediate sympathy and combination, unwit- 
tingly founding a nation by suggestion. 

The war for freedom over, the new-fledged States 
entered at once upon a very practical course of educa- 
tion which thrust its lessons upon them without regard 
to taste or predilection. The Articles of Confederation 
had been formulated and proposed to the States for 
their acceptance in 1777, as a legalization of the ar- 
rangements that had grown up under the informal 
guidance of the Continental Congress, in order that law 
might confirm and strengthen practice, and because an 
actual continental war commanded a continental organ- 
ization. But the war was virtually over by the time 
all the reluctant States had accepted the Articles; and 
the new government had hardly been put into formal 
operation before it became evident that only the war 
had made such an arrangement workable. Not com- 
pacts, but the compulsions of a common danger, had 
drawn the States into an irregular codperation, and it 
was even harder to obtain obedience to the definite 
Articles than it had been to get the requisitions of the 
unchartered Congress heeded while the war lasted. 
Peace had rendered the makeshift common government 
uninteresting, and had given each State leave to with- 
draw from common undertakings, and to think once 
more, as of old, only of itself. Their own affairs again 


COLLEGE AND STATE 319 


isolated and restored to their former separate impor- 
tance, the States could no longer spare their chief men 
for what was considered the minor work of the general 
Congress. The best men had been gradually withdrawn 
from Congress before the war ended, and now there 
seemed less reason than ever why they should be sent 
to talk at Philadelphia, when they were needed for the 
actual work of administration at home. Politics fell 
back into its old localization, and every public man 
found his chief tasks at home. ‘There were still, as a 
matter of fact, common needs and dangers scarcely less 
imperative and menacing than those which had drawn 
the colonies together against the mother country; but 
they were needs and perils of peace, and ordinary men 
did not see them; only the most thoughtful and observ- 
ant were conscious of them: extraordinary events were 
required to lift them to the general view. 

Happily, there were thoughtful and observant men 
who were already the chief figures of the country,— 
men whose leadership the people had long since come 
to look for and accept,—and it was through them that 
the States were brought to a new common conscious- 
ness, and at last to a real union. It was not possible 
for the several States to live self-sufficient and apart, 
as they had done when they were colonies. They had 
then had a common government, little as they liked to 
submit to it, and their foreign affairs had been taken 
care of. They were now to learn how ill they could 
dispense with a common providence. Instead of France, 
they now had England for neighbor in Canada and on 
the Western waters, where they had themselves but the 
other day fought so hard to set her power up. She was 
their rival and enemy, too, on the seas; refused to come 
to any treaty terms with them in regard to commerce; 
and laughed to see them unable to concert any policy 
against her because they had no common political au- 
thority among themselves. She had promised, in the 
treaty of peace, to withdraw her garrisons from the 


320 ' COLLEGE AND STATE 


Western posts which lay within the territory belonging 
to the Confederation; but Congress had promised that 
British creditors should be paid what was due them, 
only to find that the States would make no laws to fulfill 
the promise, and were determined to leave their federal 
representatives without power to make them; and Eng- 
land kept her troops where they were. Spain had taken 
France’s place upon the further bank of the Mississippi 
and at the great river’s mouth. Grave questions of 
foreign policy pressed on every side, as of old, and no 
State could settle them unaided and for herself alone. 
Here was a group of commonwealths which would 
have lived separately and for themselves, and could not; 
which had thought to make shift with merely a “league 
of friendship’ between them and a Congress for con- 
sultation, and found that it was impossible. ‘There 
were common debts to pay, but there was no common 
system of taxation by which to meet them, nor any au- 
thority to devise and enforce such a system. There were 
common enemies and rivals to deal with, but no one 
was authorized to carry out a common policy against 
them. There was a common domain to settle and ad- 
minister, but no one knew how a Congress without the 
power to command was to manage so great a property. 
The Ordinance of 1787 was indeed bravely framed, 
after a method of real statesmanship; but there was no 
warrant for it to be found in the Articles, and no one 
could say how Congress would execute a law it had had 
no authority to enact. It was not merely the hopeless 
confusion and sinister signs of anarchy which abounded 
in their own affairs—a rebellion of debtors in Massa- 
chusetts, tariff wars among the States that lay upon 
New York Bay and on the Sound, North Carolina’s 
doubtful supremacy among her settlers in the Tennes- 
see country, Virginia’s questionable authority in Ken- 
tucky—that brought the States at last to attempt a 
better union and set up a real government for the whole 
country. It was the inevitable continental outlook of 


COLLEGE AND STATE R321 


affairs as well; if nothing more, the sheer necessity 
to grow and touch their neighbors at close quarters. 

Washington had been among the first to see the neces- 
sity of living, not by a local, but by a continental policy. 
Of course he had a direct pecuniary interest in the de- 
velopment of the Western lands,—had himself pre- 
empted many a broad acre lying upon the far Ohio, as 
well as upon the nearer western slopes of the mountains, 
—and it is open to any one who likes the sinister sugges- 
tion to say that his ardor for the occupancy of the 
Western country was that of the land speculator, not 
that of the statesman. Everybody knows that it was a 
conference between delegates from Maryland and Vir- 
ginia about Washington’s favorite scheme of joining the 
upper waters of the Potomac with the upper waters of 
the streams which made their way to the Mississippi— 
a conference held at his suggestion and at his house— 
that led to the convening of that larger conference at 
Annapolis, which called for the appointment of the 
body that met at Philadelphia and framed the Constitu- 
tion under which he was to become the first President 
of the United States. It is open to any one who chooses 
to recall how keen old Governor Dinwiddie had been, 
when he came to Virginia, to watch those same Western 
waters in the interest of the first Ohio Company, in 
which he had bought stock; how promptly he called the 
attention of the ministers in England to the aggressions 
of the French in that quarter, sent Washington out as 
his agent to warn the intruders off, and pushed the busi- 
ness from stage to stage, till the French and Indian War 
was ablaze, and nations were in deadly conflict on both 
sides of the sea. It ought to be nothing new and noth- 
ing strange to those who have read the history of the 
English race the world over to learn that conquests have 
a thousand times sprung out of the initiative of men 
who have first followed private interest into new lands 
like speculators, and then planned their occupation and 
government like statesmen. Dinwiddie was no states- 


B20 COLLEGE” AND STATE 


man, but Washington was; and the circumstance which 
it is worth while to note about him is, not that he went 
prospecting upon the Ohio when the French war was 
over, but that he saw more than fertile lands there,— 
saw the “‘seat of a rising empire,’’ and, first among the 
men of his day, perceived by what means its settlers 
could be bound to the older communities in the East 
alike in interest and in polity. Here were the first 
“West” and the first ‘‘East,” and Washington’s thought 
mediating between them. 

The formation of the Union brought a real govern- 
ment into existence, and that government set about its 
work with an energy, a dignity, a thoroughness of plan, 
which made the whole country aware of it from the 
outset, and aware, consequently, of the national scheme 
of political life it had been devised to promote. Ham- 
ilton saw to it that the new government should have a 
definite party and body of interests at its back. It had 
been fostered in the making by the commercial classes 
at the ports and along the routes of commerce, and 
opposed in the rural districts which lay away from the 
centres of population. Those who knew the forces that 
played from State to State, and made America a partner 
in the life of the world, had earnestly wanted a govern- 
ment that should preside and choose in the making of 
the nation; but those who saw only the daily round of 
the countryside had been indifferent or hostile, consult- 
ing their pride and their prejudices. Hamilton sought 
a policy which should serve the men who had set the 
government up, and found it in the funding of the debt, 
both national and domestic, the assumption of the 
Revolutionary obligations of the States, and the estab- 
lishment of a national bank. This was what the friends 
of the new plan had wanted, the rehabilitation of credit, 
and the government set out with a programme meant to 
commend it to men with money and vested interests. 

It was just such a government that the men of an 
opposite interest and temperament had dreaded, and 


COLLEGE AND STATE 323 


Washington was not out of office before the issue began 
to be clearly drawn between those who wanted a strong 
government, with a great establishment, a system of 
finance which should dominate the markets, an authority 
in the field of law which should restrain the States and 
make the Union, through its courts, the sole and final 
judge of its own powers, and those who dreaded nothing 
else so much, wished a government which should hold 
the country together with as little thought as possible 
of its own aggrandizement, went all the way with Jef- 
ferson in his jealousy of the commercial interest, 
accepted his ideal of a dispersed power put into commis- 
sicn among the States,—even among the local units 
within the State,—and looked to see liberty discredited 
amidst a display of federal power. When the first party 
had had their day in the setting up of the government 
and the inauguration of a policy which should make it 
authoritative, the party of Jefferson came in to purify 
it. They began by attacking the federal courts, which 
had angered every man of their faith by a steady main- 
tenance and elaboration of the federal power; they 
ended by using that power just as their opponents had 
used it. In the first place, it was necessary to buy Louisi- 
ana, and with it the control of the Mississippi, notwith- 
standing Mr. Jefferson’s solemn conviction that such an 
act was utterly without constitutional warrant; in the 
second place, they had to enforce an arbitrary embargo 
in order to try their hand at reprisal upon foreign rivals 
in trade; in the end, they had to recharter the national 
bank, create a national debt and a sinking fund, impose 
an excise upon whiskey, lay direct taxes, devise a pro- 
tective tariff, use coercion upon those who would not aid 
them in a great war,—play the role of masters and tax- 
gatherers as the Federalists had played it,—on a greater 
scale, even, and with equal gusto. Everybody knows 
the familiar story: it has new significance from day to 
day only as it illustrates the invariable process of nation- 


324 COLLEGE AND STATE 


making which has gone on from generation to genera- 
tion, from the first until now. 

Opposition to the exercise and expansion of the fed- 
eral power only made it the more inevitable by making 
it the more deliberate. The passionate protests, the 
plain speech, the sinister forecasts, of such men as John 
Randolph aided the process by making it self-conscious. 
What Randolph meant as an accusation, those who chose 
the policy of the government presently accepted as a 
prophecy. It was true, as he said, that a nation was in 
the making, and a government under which the priy- 
ileges of the States would count for less than the com- 
pulsions of the common interest. Few had seen it so at 
first; the men who were old when the government was 
born refused to see it so to the last; but the young men 
and those who came fresh upon the stage from decade 
to decade presently found the scarecrow look like a 
thing they might love. Their ideal took form with the 
reiterated suggestion; they began to hope for what they 
had been bidden to dread. No party could long use the 
federal authority without coming to feel it national,— 
without forming some ideal of the common interest, and 
ot the use of power by which it should be fostered. 

When they adopted the tariff of 1816, the Jefferson- 
ians themselves formulated a policy which should endow 
the federal government with a greater economic power 
than even Hamilton had planned when he sought to win 
the support of the merchants and the lenders of money; 
and when they bought something like a third of the 
continent beyond the Mississippi, they made it certain 
the nation should grow upon a continental scale which 
no provincial notions about state powers and a common 
government kept within strait bounds could possibly 
survive. Here were the two forces which were to dom- 
inate us till the present day, and make the present issues 
of our politics: an open ‘“‘West” into which a frontier 
population was to be thrust from generation to genera- 
tion, and a protective tariff which should build up spe- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 325, 


cial interests the while in the ‘‘East,’’ and make the 
contrast ever sharper and sharper between section and 
section. What the “West” is doing now is simply to 
note more deliberately than ever before, and with a 
keener distaste, this striking contrast between her own 
development and that of the ‘‘East.”’ That was a true 
instinct of statesmanship which led Henry Clay to couple 
a policy of internal improvements with a policy of pro- 
tection. Internal improvements meant in that day great 
roads leading into the West, and every means taken 
to open the country to use and settlement. While a pro- 
tective tariff was building up special industries in the 
East, public works should make an outlet into new 
lands for all who were not getting the benefit of the 
system. The plan worked admirably for many a day, 
and was justly called ‘“‘American,” so well did it match 
the circumstances of a set of communities, half old, 
half new: the old waiting to be developed, the new set- 
ting the easy scale of living. The other side of the 
policy was left for us. There is no longer any outlet 
for those who are not the beneficiaries of the protective 
system, and nothing but the contrasts it has created 
remains to mark its triumphs. Internal improvements 
no longer relieve the strain; they have become merely 
a means of largess. 

The history of the United States has been one con- 
tinuous story of rapid, stupendous growth, and all its 
great questions have been questions of growth. It was 
proposed in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that 
a limit should be set to the number of new members to 
be admitted to the House of Representatives from 
States formed beyond the Alleghanies; and the sugges- 
tion was conceived with a true instinct of prophecy. 
The old States were not only to be shaken out of their 
self-centred life, but were even to see their very gov- 
ernment changed over their heads by the rise of States 
in the Western country. John Randolph voted against 
the admission of Ohio into the Union, because he held 


326 COLLEGE AND STATE 


that no new partner should be admitted to the federal 
‘arrangement except by unanimous consent. It was the 
very next year that Louisiana was purchased, and a 
million square miles were added to the territory out of 
which new States were to made. Had the original 
States been able to live to themselves, keeping their own 
people, elaborating their own life, without a common 
property to manage, unvexed by a vacant continent, 
national questions might have been kept within modest 
limits. They might even have made shift to digest 
Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Alabama, and the 
great commonwealths carved out of the Northwest 
Territory, for which the Congress of the Confederation 
had already made provision. But the Louisiana pur- 
chase opened the continent to the planting of States, 
and took the processes of nationalization out of the 
hands of the original “‘partners.’’ Questions of politics 
were henceforth to be questions of growth. 

For a while the question of slavery dominated all the 
rest. The Northwest Territory was closed to slavery 
by the Ordinance of 1787. ‘Tennessee, Kentucky, Mis- 
sissippi, Alabama, took slavery almost without question 
from the States from which they were sprung. But 
Missouri gave the whole country view of the matter 
which must be settled in the making of every State 
founded beyond the Mississippi. The slavery struggle, 
which seems to us who are near it to occupy so great a 
space in the field of our affairs, was, of course, a struggle 
for and against the extension of slavery, not for or 
against its existence in the States where it had taken 
root from of old,—a question of growth, not of 
law. It will some day be seen to have been, for all it 
was so stupendous, a mere episode of development. Its 
result was to remove a ground of economic and social 
difference as between section and section which threat- 
ened to become permanent, standing forever in the way 
of a homogeneous national life. The passionate strug- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 327 


gle to prevent its extension inevitably led to its total 
abolition; and the way was cleared for the South, as 
well as the ‘‘West,” to become like its neighbor sections 
in every element of its life. 

It had also a further, almost incalculable effect in its 
stimulation of a national sentiment. It created through- 
out the North and Northwest a passion of devotion to 
the Union which really gave the Union a new character. 
The nation was fused into a single body in the fervent 
heat of the time. At the beginning of the war the South 
had seemed like a section pitted against a section; at its 
close it seemed a territory conquered by a neighbor na- 
tion. That nation is now, take it roughly, that ‘‘East” 
which we contrast with the ‘‘West” of our day. ‘The 
economic conditions once centred at New York, Boston, 
Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburg, and the other com- 
mercial and industrial cities of the coast States are now 
to be found, hardly less clearly marked, in Chicago, in 
Minneapolis, in Detroit, through all the great States 
that lie upon the Lakes, in all the old ‘‘Northwest.” 
The South has fallen into a new economic classification. 
In respect of its stage of development it belongs with 
the ‘‘West,” though in sentiment, in traditional ways of 
life, in many a point of practice and detail, it keeps 
its old individuality, and though it has in its peculiar 
labor problem a hindrance to progress at once unique 
and ominous. | 

It is to this point we have come in the making of 
the nation. The old sort of growth is at an end,— 
the growth by mere expansion. We have now to look 
more closely to internal conditions, and study the means 
by which a various people is to be bound together in a 
single interest. Many differences will pass away of 
themselves. ‘East’ and ‘‘West”’ will come together by 
a slow approach, as capital accumulates where now it 
is only borrowed, as industrial development makes its 
way westward in a new variety, as life gets its final 
elaboration and detail throughout all the great spaces of 


328 COLLEGE AND STATE 


the continent, until all the scattered parts of the nation 
are drawn into real community of interest. Even the 
race problem of the South will no doubt work itself 
cut in the slowness of time, as blacks and whites pass 
from generation to generation, gaining with each re- 
move from the memories of the war a surer self-posses- 
sion, an easier view of the division of labor and of social 
function to be arranged between them. ‘Time is the 
only legislator in such a matter. But not everything 
can be left to drift and slow accommodation. The na- 
tion which has grown to the proportions almost of the 
continent within the century lies under our eyes, un- 
finished, unharmonized, waiting still to have its parts 
adjusted, lacking its last lesson in the ways of peace 
and-concert. It required statesmanship of no mean 
sort to bring us to our present growth and lusty strength. 
It will require leadership of a much higher order to 
teach us the triumphs of codperation, the self-possession 
and calm choices of maturity. 

Much may be brought about by a mere knowledge of 
the situation. It is not simply the existence of facts that 
governs us, but consciousness and comprehension of the 
facts. ‘The whole process of statesmanship consists in 
bringing facts to light, and shaping law to suit, or, if 
need be, mould them. It is part of our present danger 
that men of the “East” listen only to their own public 
men, men of the ‘‘West”’ only to theirs. We speak of 
the “West” as out of sympathy with the ‘“‘East’’: it 
would be instructive once and again to reverse the terms, 
and admit that the ‘“‘East’’ neither understands nor sym- 
pathizes with the ‘‘West,”—and thorough nationaliza- 
tion depends upon mutual understandings and sympa- 
thies. There is an unpleasant significance in the fact that 
the ‘“‘East” has made no serious attempt to understand 
the desire for the free coinage of silver in the “West” 
and the South. If it were once really probed and com- 
prehended, we should know that it is necessary to re- 
form our currency at once, and we should know in what 


COLLEGE AND STATE 329 


way it is necessary to reform it; we should know that a 
new protective tariff only marks with a new emphasis 
the contrast in economic interest between the ‘“‘East’’ 
and the ‘“‘West,” and that nothing but currency reform 
can touch the cause of the present discontents. 
Ignorance and indifference as between section and sec- 
tion no man need wonder at who knows the habitual 
courses of history; and no one who comprehends the 
essential soundness of our people’s life can mistrust 
the future of the nation. He may confidently expect a 
safe nationalization of interest and policy in the end, 
whatever folly of experiment and fitful change he may 
fear in the meanwhile. He can only wonder that we 
should continue to leave ourselves so utterly without 
adequate means of formulating a national policy. Cer- 
tainly Providence has presided over our affairs with a 
strange indulgence, if it is true that Providence helps 
only those who first seek to help themselves. The mak- 
ing of a nation has never been a thing deliberately 
planned and consummated by the counsel and authority 
of leaders, but the daily conduct and policy of a nation 
which has won its place must be so planned. So far we 
have had the hopefulness, the readiness, and the hardi- 
hood of youth in these matters, and have never become 
fully conscious of the position into which our peculiar 
frame of government has brought us. We have waited 
a whole century to observe that we have made no pro- 
vision for authoritative national leadership in matters 
of policy. The President does not always speak with 
authority, because he is not always a man picked out 
and tested by any processes in which the people have 
been participants, and has often nothing but his office 
to render him influential. Even when the country does 
know and trust him, he can carry his views no further 
than to recommend them to the attention of Congress 
in a written message which the Houses would deem 
themselves subservient to give too much heed to. 
Within the Houses there is no man, except the Vice- 


330 COLLEGE AND STATE 


President, to whose choice the whole country gives 
heed; and he is chosen, not to be a Senator, but only to 
wait upon the disability of the President, and preside 
meanwhile over a body of which he is not a member. 
The House of Representatives has in these latter days 
made its Speaker its political leader as well as its parlia- 
mentary moderator; but the country is, of course, never 
consulted about that beforehand, and his leadership is 
not the open leadership of discussion, but the undebat- 
able leadership of the parliamentray autocrat. 

This singular leaderless structure of our government 
never stood fully revealed until the present generation, 
and even now awaits general recognition. Peculiar cir- 
cumstances and the practical political habit and sagacity 
of our people for long concealed it. “The framers of the 
Constitution no doubt expected the President and his 
advisers to exercise a real leadership in affairs, and for 
more than a generation after the setting up of the gov- 
ernment their expectation was fulfilled. Washington 
was accepted as leader no less by Congress than by the 
people. Hamilton, from the Treasury, really gave the 
government both its policy and its administrative struc- 
ture. If John Adams had less authority than Washing- 
ton, it was because the party he represented was losing 
its hold upon the country. Jefferson was the most con- 
summate party chief, the most unchecked master of 
legislative policy, we have had in America, and his 
dynasty was continued in Madison and Monroe. But 
Madison’s terms saw Clay and Calhoun come to the 
front in the House, and many another man of the new 
generation, ready to guide and coach the President 
rather than to be absolutely controlled by him. Monroe 
was not of the calibre of his predecessors, and no party 
could rally about so stiff a man, so cool a partisan, as 
John Quincy Adams. And so the old political function 
of the presidency came to an end, and it was left for 
Jackson to give it a new one,— instead of a leadership 
of counsel, a leadership and discipline by rewards and 


COLLEGE AND STATE 331 


punishments. Then the slavery issue began to dominate 
politics, and a long season of concentrated passion 
brought individual men of force into power in Congress, 
——natural leaders of men like Clay, trained and eloquent 
advocates like Webster, keen debaters with a logic 
whose thrusts were as sharp as those of cold steel like 
Calhoun. The war made the Executive of necessity the 
nation’s leader again, with the great Lincoln at its head, 
who seemed to embody, with a touch of genius, the 
very character of the race itself. Then reconstruction 
came,—under whose leadership who could say ?—and 
we were left to wonder what, henceforth, in the days of 
ordinary peace and industry, we were to make of a 
government which could in humdrum times yield us no 
leadership at all. The tasks which confront us now are 
not like those which centred in the war, in which passion 
made men run together to a common work. Heaven 
forbid that we should admit any element of passion into 
the delicate matters in which national policy must me- 
diate between the differing economic interests of sections 
which a wise moderation will assuredly unite in the ways 
of harmony and peace! We shall need, not the mere 
compromises of Clay, but a constructive leadership of 
which Clay hardly showed himself capable. 

There are few things more disconcerting to the 
thought, in any effort to forecast the future of our 
affairs, than the fact that we must continue to take our 
executive policy from presidents given us by nominating 
conventions, and our legislation from conference com- 
mittees of the House and Senate. Evidently it is a 
purely providential form of government. We should 
never have had Lincoln for President had not the Re- 
publican convention of 1860 sat in Chicago, and felt 
the weight of the galleries in its work,—and one does 
not like to think what might have happened had Mr. 
Seward been nominated. We might have had Mr. 
Bryan for President, because of the impression which 
may be made upon an excited assembly by a good voice 


332 COLLEGE AND STATE 


and a few ringing sentences flung forth just after a 
cold man who gave unpalatable counsel has sat down. 
The country knew absolutely nothing about Mr. Bryan 
before his nomination, and it would not have known 
anything about him afterward had he not chosen to 
make speeches. It was not Mr. McKinley, but Mr. 
Reed, who was the real leader of the Republican party. 
It has become a commonplace amongst us that conven- 
tions prefer dark horses,—prefer those who are not 
tested leaders with well-known records to those who are. 
It has become a commonplace amongst all nations which 
have tried popular institutions that the actions of such 
bodies as our nominating conventions are subject to the 
play of passion and of chance. They meet to do a 
single thing,—for the platform is really left to a com- 
mittee,—and upon that one thing all intrigue centres. 
Who that has witnessed them will ever forget the intense 
night scenes, the feverish recesses, of our nominating 
conventions, when there is a running to and fro of 
agents from delegation to delegation, and every candi- 
date has his busy headquarters,—can ever forget the 
shouting and almost frenzied masses on the floor of 
the hall when the convention is in session, swept this 
way and that by every wind of sudden feeling, impatient 
of debate, incapable of deliberation? When a con- 
vention’s brief work is over, its own members can 
scarcely remember the plan and order of it. They go 
home unmarked, and sink into the general body of those 
who have nothing to do with the conduct of govern- 
ment. ‘They cannot be held responsible if their candi- 
date fails in his attempt to carry on the Executive. 

It has not often happened that candidates for the 
presidency have been chosen from outside the ranks of 
those who have seen service in national politics. Con- 
gress is apt to be peculiarly sensitive to the exercise of 
executive authority by men who have not at some time 
been members of the one House or the other, and so 
learned to sympathize with members’ views as to the 


COLLEGE AND STATE 333 


relations that ought to exist between the President and 
the federal legislature. No doubt a good deal of the 
dislike which the Houses early conceived for Mr. Cleve- 
land was due to the feeling that he was an “‘outsider,”’ 
a man without congressional sympathies and points of 
view,—a sort of irregular and amateur at the delicate 
game of national politics as played at Washington; most 
of the men whom he chose as advisers were of the same 
kind, without Washington credentials. Mr. McKinley, 
though of the congressional circle himself, has repeated 
the experiment in respect of his cabinet in the appoint- 
ment of such men as Mr. Gage and Mr. Bliss and Mr. 
Gary. Members resent such appointments; they seem 
to drive the two branches of the government further 
apart than ever, and yet they grow more common from 
administration to administration. 

These appointments make cooperation between Con- 
gress and the Executive more difficult, not because the 
men thus appointed lack respect for the Houses or seek 
to gain any advantage over them, but because they do 
not know how to deal with them,—through what per- 
sons and by what courtesies of approach. ‘To the un- 
initiated Congress is simply a mass of individuals. It 
has no responsible leaders known to the system of goy- 
ernment, and the leaders recognized by its rules are 
ene set of individuals for one sort of legislation, an- 
other for another. ‘The Secretaries cannot address or 
approach either House as a whole; in dealing with 
committees they are dealing only with groups of indi- 
viduals; neither party has its leader,—there are only 
influential men here and there who know how to manage 
its caucuses and take advantage of parliamentary open- 
ings on the floor. There is a master in the House, as 
every member very well knows, and even the easy-going 
public are beginning to observe. The speaker appoints 
the committees; the committees practically frame all 
legislation; the Speaker, accordingly, gives or withholds 
legislative power and opportunity, and members are 


334 COLLEGE AND STATE 


granted influence or deprived of it much as he pleases. 
He of course administers the rules, and the rules are 
framed to prevent debate and individual initiative. He 
can refuse recognition for the introduction of measures 
he disapproves of as party chief; he may make way for 
those he desires to see passed. He is chairman of the 
Committee on Rules, by which the House submits to 
be governed (for fear of helplessness and chaos) in the 
arrangement of its business and the apportionment of 
its time. In brief, he is not only its moderator, but its 
master. New members protest and write to the news- 
papers; but old members submit,—and indeed the 
Speaker’s power is inevitable. You must have leaders in 
a numerous body,—leaders with authority; and you 
cannot give authority in the House except through the 
rules. ‘The man who administers the rules must be 
master, and you must put this mastery into the hands of 
your best party leader. The legislature being separated 
from the executive branch of the government, the only 
rewards and punishments by which you can secure party 
discipline are those within the gift of the rules,—the 
committee appointments and preferences: you cannot 
administer these by election; party government would 
break down in the midst of personal exchanges of elec- 
toral favors. Here again you must trust the Speaker 
to organize and choose, and your only party leader is 
your moderator. He does not lead by debate; he ex- 
plains, he proposes nothing to the country; you learn 
his will in his rulings. 

_It is with such machinery that we are to face the 
future, find a wise and moderate policy, bring the nation 
to a common, a cordial understanding, a real unity of 
life. The President can lead only as he can command 
the ear of both Congress and the country,—only as any 
other individual might who could secure a like general 
hearing and acquiescence. Policy must come always 
from the deliberations of the House committees, the 
debates, both secret and open, of the Senate, the com- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 335 


promises of committee conference between the Houses; 
no one man, no group of men, leading; no man, no group 
of men, responsible for the outcome. Unquestionably 
we believe in a guardian destiny! No other race could 
have accomplished so much with such a system; no other 
race would have dared risk such an experiment. We 
shall work out a remedy, for work it out we must. We 
must find or make, somewhere in our system, a group 
of men to lead us, who represent the nation in the origin 
and responsibility of their power; who shall draw the 
Executive, which makes choice of foreign policy and 
upon whose ability and good faith the honorable execu- 
tion of the laws depends, into cordial codperation with 
the legislature, which, under whatever form of gov- 
ernment, must sanction law and policy. Only under a ° 
national leadership, by a national selection of leaders, 
and by a method of constructive choice rather than of 
compromise and barter, can a various nation be peace- 
fully led. Once more is our problem of nation-making 
the problem of a form of government. Shall we show 
the sagacity, the open-mindedness, the moderation, in 
our task of modification, that were shown under Wash- 
ington and Madison and Sherman and Franklin and 
Wilson, in the task of construction? 


LEADERLESS GOVERNMENT 


ADDRESS BEFORE THE VIRGINIA STATE BAR ASSOCIA- 
TION, AUGUST 4, 1897. JAMES E. GOODE PRINTING 
COMPANY, RICHMOND, 1897. 


GENTLEMEN OF THE VIRGINIA STATE Bar AssocI- 
ATION: 


Before I enter upon the discussion of my theme, 
permit me to express my keen gratification at find- 
ing myself in this congenial company. I am a lawyer 
and a Virginian. I feel here the sort of exhilaration 
that must always come to a man who returns from a 
distance to breathe his native air again and mix once 
more with those to whom he feels bound by a sort of 
intellectual consanguinity. I am proud of Virginia’s 
traditions, as you are. I feel, as you do, that she gave 
the country its first life, long kept a sort of presidency 
in its affairs, and has always been one of the strategic 
centres of its society and its politics. I feel as if her 
great University, where, like so many of you, I was 
trained in the law, were still in no small part my aca- 
demic home; and I know that here, among men of my 
own race and breeding, I can speak my mind frankly 
upon any theme, as the best men have always spoken in 
Virginia ever since Sir George Yeardly summoned that 
first assembly in the little church at Jamestown in the 
far year 1619. 

It heartens a man not a little to know that he may 
speak his real thought and be understood, if he but 
speak it in the right temper. It is my purpose to-day to 
speak of public affairs; and we have a longer tradition 
than that of Virginia, even, to give us warrant for free 
speech in that field. We have the immemorial practice 

336 


COLLEGE AND STATE 337 


of the English race itself, to which we belong. No- 
where else has the pure strain of the nation which 
planted the colonies and made the independent govern- 
ment under which we live been kept so without taint or 
mixture as it has been in Virginia, and hitherto in all 
the South. One feels here that the origin and breeding, 
the impulse and the memory of the men he deals with 
are unmistakable; that he reckons with an ascertained 
force and a certain habit—a force and a habit that have 
not changed since the great days of the Revolution, 
when Virginia led the country in the making of the 
Constitution; and that he ought to be able to count now, 
among the offspring of that achieving generation, upon 
the same fearless examination of policies and institu- 
tions that enabled Washington and Mason and Henry 
and Madison to win triumphs in their heroic day. 

This is not a day of revolution; but it is a day of 
change, and of such change as may breed revolution, 
should we fail to guide and moderate it. Institutions, 
if they live, must grow, and suffer the alterations of 
growth—must rise to new uses; must lose some parts 
and take others on. They cannot stand still; they can- 
not even stiffen to a single shape and use. The nation 
must at every turn make its choice, not only as to legis- 
lative policy, but also as to the uses to which it shall 
put its fundamental law and its very principles of 
government. 

If ever a nation was transformed, this nation has 
been, under the eyes of a single generation—and proc- 
esses that run so fast are perilous. The choices made in 
the midst of them are not deliberate, but hasty and 
almost at hazard; the necessary adjustments of life and 
institutions are made, not by plan, but upon the sug- 
gestion of the instant. It is matter, surely, of common 
prudence that we should pause and look the time 
through when we can, with a purpose to gain distinct 
knowledge of what is going forward, discover its force 
and direction, and make ourselves ready to assume con- 


338 COLLEGE AND STATE 


trol of it for the future, seeing that the pace is now set, 
the running determined. It is time we should speak 
frankly with each other about the present and about the 
future. 

I mean to go, if I can, to-day, to the centre of some 
of the chief topics of government. We chose the forms 
of political life under which we live, and it is our duty 
to scrutinize them from season to season, if we would 
keep them incorrupt and suitable to our use. We-talk 
of statesmanship and of policy sometimes as if they 
arose out of institutions; but we know that they do not. 
They are the children of individual initiative and of in- 
dividual strength of character. The framers of our 
Constitution in this country made a great deal of insti- 
tutions; but, after all, institutions only create the con- 
dition under which action must be planned: they do not 
breed action. No government will run itself. ‘The 
excellence of any form of government depends upon the 
provision it has made for the action of those who con- 
duct it and choose its policies. It gets its character 
from what they find it possible to do. The men who 
chose our present forms of government made much of 
law and of method because they were engaged in a work 
of actual creation. | They were constructing a polity 
which was novel and without model, and they knew that 
definiteness of plan was, for the time being, everything. 
They were forging, and fitting and bolting the struc- 
tural iron of the whole fabric of which they were the 
originating architects. But we are now choosing poli- 
cies, not forms of government. The nation is made— 
its mode of action is determined; what we now want to 
know is: What is it going to do with its life, its ma- 
terial resources and its spiritual strength? How is it 
to gain and keep a common purpose in the midst of 
complex affairs; how is its government to afford it wis- 
dom in action? 

This is the question I have chosen to discuss. Put in 
its most direct form it is this: How is the nation to get 


COLLEGE AND STATE 339 


definite leadership and form steady and effective par- 
ties? Take what government you will, this question 
includes all others, if you inquire concerning efficiency. 
Among a free people there can be no other method of 
government than such as permits an undictated choice 
of leaders and a strong, unhampered making up of 
bodies of active men to give them effective support. 
When party government fails, all definiteness goes out | 
of politics. | Who is to be held responsible for policy ? 
By what legerdemain are you to get anything done? 
Shall you convince one man at a time the nation 
through, assume that your neighbor counts for as much 
in affairs as any one else, hazard the fortunes of the 
nation upon a chance concurrence of opinion? Policy, 
—where there is no absolute and arbitrary ruler to do 
the choosing for a whole people—means massed opin- 
ion, and the forming of the mass is the whole art and 
mastery of politics. How is the massing done among 
us? Who chooses our leaders, and by what process? 
What guides our parties and what do we know them to 
stand for? These are questions of fact, to be answered 
first without attention to the criticisms our answers may 
suggest with regard to some of the radical features of 
our constitutional arrangements. Let those criticisms 
follow after, if they must. We cannot afford to blink 
either the facts or their necessary revelation. 

I have told you my own conclusion with regard to our 
present constitutional usage in the title I have chosen 
for this address. By the words “Leaderless Govern- 
ment” I mean to describe the government of the United 
States. I do not utter the words with the least touch 
of censoriousness or cynicism or even discouragement. 
In using them I am simply speaking a careful and, if I 
may say so, a dispassionate judgment. I do not believe’ 
it a necessary feature of our government that we should 
be without leaders; neither do I believe that we shall 
continue to be without them; but as a matter of fact we 
are without them, and we ought to ask ourselves, Why ?. 


340 COLLEGE AND STATE 


I mean, of course, that we are without official leaders— 
without leaders who can be held immediately responsi- 
ble for the action and policy of the government, alike 
upon its legislative and upon its administrative side. 
Leaders of some sort we, of course, always have; but 
they come and go like phantoms, put forward as if by 
accident, withdrawn, not by our choice, but as if upon 
some secret turn of fortune which we neither anticipate 
nor as a nation control—some local quarrel, some ob- 
scure movement of politics within a single district, some 
manipulation of a primary or some miscarriage in a 
convention. They are not of the nation, but come and 
go as if unbidden by any general voice. The govern- 
ment does not put them forward, but groups of men 
formed we hardly know where, planning we hardly 
know what; the government suffers no change when they 
disappear—that is the private affair of some single 
constituency and of the men who have supplanted them. 

Look at the familiar system for a little with this 
matter in view, and you shall see that, as we now use it, 
it seems devised as if to prevent official and responsible 
/leadership. ‘The President cannot lead. We call his 
office great, say that the Queen of England has no 
power to be compared with his and make choice of 
nominees for the presidency as if our votes decided a 
constructive policy for the four years to come; but we 
know that in fact he has as little power to originate as 
the Queen has. He may, no doubt, stand in the way of 
measures with a veto very hard to overleap; and we 
think oftentimes with deep comfort of the laws he can 
kill when we are afraid of the majority in Congress. 
Congressional majorities are doubtless swayed, too, by 
what they know the President will do with the bills 
they send him. But they are swayed sometimes one way 
and sometimes the other, according to the temper of the 
times and state of parties. They as often make his 
assured veto a pretext for recklessness as a reason for 
self-restraint. [hey take a sort of irresponsible and 


COLLEGE AND STATE 341 


defiant pleasure in “‘giving him the dare’’: in proposing 
things they know many people want and putting upon 
him the lonely responsibility of saying that they shall 
not have them. And if he stand for long in the way 
of any serious party purpose, they heat opinion against 
him and make his position more and more unpleasant, 
until he either yields or is finally discredited. It is a 
game in which he has no means of attack and few 
effective weapons of defence. 

Of course he can send a message to Congress when- 
ever he likes—the Constitution bids him do so “from 
time to time,” in order to ‘“‘give the Congress informa- 
tion of the state of the Union and recommend to their 
consideration such measures as he shall deem necessary 
and expedient’’; and we know that, if he be a man of 
real power and statesmanlike initiative, he may often 
hit the wish and purpose of the nation so in the quick 
in what he urges upon Congress that the House will 
heed him promptly and seriously enough. But there is 
a stubborn and very natural pride in the Houses with 
respect to this matter. They, not he, are the nation’s 
representatives in the making of law; and they would 
deem themselves subservient were they too often to 
permit him leadership in legislative policy. It is easy 
to stir their resentment by too much suggestion; and 
it is best that a message should be general, not special 
—best that it should cover a good many topics and not 
confine itself too narrowly to one, if a President would 
keep in credit with those who shape matters within the 
House and Senate. In all ordinary times the President 
recognizes this and preserves a sort of modesty, a tone 
as if of a chronicler merely, and setter forth of things 
administrative, when he addresses Congress. He makes 
it his study to use only a private influence and never 
to seem a maker of resolutions. And even when the 
occasion is extraordinary and his own mind definitely 
made up, he argues and urges—he cannot command. 
In short, in making suggestions to Congress the Presi- 


342 COLLEGE AND STATE 


dent of the United States has only this advantage over 
any other influential person in the nation who might 
choose to send to Congress a letter of information and 
\advice. It is the duty of Congress to read what he says; 
all the larger newspapers will print it; most of them will 
have editorial comments upon it; and some will have 
letters from their Washington correspondents devoted 
to guessing what effect, if any, it will have upon legisla- 
tion. The President can make his message a means of 
concentrating public opinion upon particular topics of 
his own choosing, and so force those topics upon the 
attention of the House. But that is all; and under 
ordinary circumstances it is not much. 

It was not so in the early years of the government. 
Roughly speaking, Presidents were leaders until An- 
drew Jackson went home to the “Hermitage.” Some- 
times they have been leaders since; but in the old days it 
was a matter of course that they should be. Since 
Jackson’s masterful figure passed off the stage, the 
ordinary courses of politics have been drawing us away 
from the state of things which once made the country, 
and politicians themselves, instinctively turn to the 
President for guidance, as if he were a sort of prime 
minister as well as the official head of the permanent 
administration. Washington led, of course, and fash- 
ioned the government itself—for reasons no man any 
longer needs to have stated to him; and his first cabinet, 
as everybody knows, was made up of the party masters 
of the day—men whom all knew to be chief political 
figures, for the moment not only, but also for the years 
to come. John Adams, the second President, was al- 
most as great a figure in all civil affairs as Washington 
himself. Jefferson was a born leader of men, who not 
only led his party, but first created it and then taught 
it the methods of power. Madison felt, in no small 
measure, that compulsion by which later Presidents by 
the half dozen have been led and mastered, the compul- 
sion of Congressional initiative—resident in that day of 


COLLEGE AND STATE 343 


change in the persons of Henry Clay and John C. Cal- 
houn, under whom, themselves youngsters in the arena, 
a young party was coming to self-consciousness and 
authority. But Madison was of a stature and eminence 
in affairs which even the high and taking qualities of 
these men could not dwarf. Monroe saw times of 
quiet peace, when parties seemed for a little to have 
fallen asleep. John Quincy Adams but kept the seat 
warm for Jackson—and not very warm at that; and 
with Jackson came in a new democracy. which was to 
change the whole face of affairs. 

Merely to name these men is to call the roll of the 
leaders of two generations. It was taken for granted 
at the first that the real leaders of the nation would be 
put into the presidential chair. For a little while Vice- 
Presidents succeeded Presidents, as if of course; and 
then for a season Presidents were allowed to name their 
own successors in their appointment to the office of 
Secretary of State—or, rather, were expected to fill that 
great office with men whom their party accepted as sec- 
ond only to the Presidents themselves in weight and 
influence, their natural successors. “The management of 
these things was left in that day to well-known groups 
of men which all the country knew to constitute, each 
for its own party, a sort of unofficial ministry. Nomina- 
tions were arranged in Congressional caucus, by men in 
whose hands rested not only the conduct of these mat- 
ters, but the whole shaping of party policies as well; 
and they naturally chose according to some recognized 
plan, compatible with the immediate objects of their 
organization, putting those in authority who were their 
actual leaders, and to whom they looked for guidance 
whether in office or out. 

It was no doubt inevitable that this system of Con- 
gressional nomination should come to an end. ‘The 
nation began before very long to look upon it as a 
system which bred intrigue and threatened to put affairs 
of the first importance into the hands of cliques and 


344 COLLEGE AND STATE 


“rings.”’ But in rejecting that system to pass to the use 
of nominating conventions we certainly rendered it im- 
possible—or, at any rate, in the highest degree unlikely 
—that our Presidents should ever be leaders again. Do 
what you will in such a matter, you do not very much 
lessen the overwhelming weight of Congress. You still 
leave the real energy of the government with the men 
who make the laws, pay the bills, and create the condi- 
tions under which Presidents must act. Roger Sherman 
declared very bluntly, in the Constitutional Convention 
of 1787, that “he considered the executive magistracy 
as nothing more than an institution for carrying the will 
of the Legislature into effect’’; and, although we may 
not be willing to go to the length of saying quite so 
much as that, we see even more clearly now than Roger 
Sherman did at the beginning that, in the last resort, it 
lies with Congress, and not with the executive, to choose 
what the government shall be and do. And we know 
that it is a serious matter that the intimate relations 
which once existed between Congress and the President 
should have been so completely broken. 

The men who are sent to our nominating conventions 
are men, for the most part, little known—and in other 
matters little regarded; men who have nothing to do 
with legislation, and who are without any responsible 
part whatever in the choice of policies for the nation. 
An incalculable number of local influences, utterly ob- 
scure to the country at large, and unconnected, as we 
know, with any general party purpose or policy of which 
the country can know anything, determine the instruc- 
tions with which delegates are sent. “hey run together 
to press the claims of a score of candidates, selected, 
not by the general voice of any party, but upon grounds 
of preference which only their special friends and par- 
tisans can explain. Generally it turns out that the can- 
didates whom all the country knows have been too much 
talked about beforehand, too definitely preferred or 
rejected in the preliminary contests in which the dele- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 345 


gates were chosen. Some “dark horse’; some man 
hitherto little thought of; some one whom his friends 
have astutely known how to push in the secret confer- 
ences of separate delegations; some man whose per- 
sonal tact of force has caught of a sudden the enthusi- 
asm of the convention itself and of the crowds in its 
galleries; some man unheralded and untried, it may be, 
catches the drift of the vote and is nominated. A good 
man he may be, and a fair President—Providence has 
been kind to us much beyond the encouragement we 
have given it; but he is not always a man whom we 
know, and he is seldom a man accepted in Washington 
as of course a leader and maker of affairs. 

Singular things happen in the process. A new figure 
emerges, sometimes, behind the accepted candidate, the 
figures of his backer and manager. Nobody has known 
him, until now, outside his State. Men hear his name 
with curiosity. But, if his candidate be elected, they 
hear it for a little while with awe—and behold, a new 
Colossus in the midst of our shifting politics! Seasoned 
Congressmen smile in their beards, no doubt, to see the 
new man come radiant to Washington, beaming author- 
ity on every side; but they court him for a brief space, 
as one who has the ear of the President in the making 
of appointments; and then, when the appointments are 
made and the President has found his place, they draw 
aside to see whether this crack coach will slip into 
oblivion or not. And so each man has his entry and 
his exit. 

And even if things go differently, even when the man 
whom the convention nominates is some one of whose 
career and influence we know or can assess, how often 
does it happen that he is such a man as will be accepted 
as a real leader at Washington—where alone he can 
lead? Nobody supposes, I take it, that Mr. McKinley 
was ever the real leader of the Republican party. He 
did not even play a really constructive part in the fram- 
ing of the celebrated tariff law which we call by his 


346 COLLEGE AND STATE 


name; but the country thought that he did and rejected 
what they deemed his handiwork in the most emphatic 
manner, by name and title. Whatever personal admira- 
tion Mr. McKinley may have excited by reason of the 
sincerity, simplicity, and directness of his character, he 
was clearly dwarfed in all matters of party choice by Mr. 
Reed and Mr. Lodge, and the real leaders of the Re- 
publican ranks. It was much the same as if Mr. Depew 
had been taken in his stead, a prominent person, but no 
master of policy—except that Congressmen particularly 
resent the selection of an outsider. Mr. McKinley had 
at least been bred to politics in the atmosphere of 
Washington, and might be expected to know something 
of the temper and tact of dealings between the Presi- 


© dent and the Houses. Plainly the nominating conven- 


tion has separated legislature and executive much more 


. sharply than the makers of the Constitution intended; 


\ 


has brought utterly incalculable forces into play for the 
choice of our Presidents; and has cut us off once and 
for all from the old traditions of party leadership. We 
must take our Presidents somewhat at haphazard and 
by a special, clumsy, machinery out of the general body 


-of the nation; and the Houses must provide themselves 


with purposes and leaders of their own. 

And yet the Houses show a notable lack of efficient 
organization; for I take it for granted that when one 
is speaking of a representative legislature he must mean 
by “an efficient organization,’ an organization which 
provides for deliberate, and deliberative, action, and 
which enables the nation to affix responsibility for what 
is done and what is not done. The Senate is deliberate 
enough; but it is hardly deliberative after its ancient and 
better manner; and who shall say who is responsible for 
what it does and for what it does not do? The House 
of Representatives is neither deliberate nor deliberative. 
We have not forgotten that one of the most energetic 
of its recent Speakers thanked God, in his frankness, 
that the House was not a deliberative body. It has not 


COLLEGE. AND STATE 347 


time for the leadership of argument; it has not time, 
therefore, to disclose the individual weight of its mem- 
bers. Debate takes time. It also lets the nation hear 
the prevailing voices and the reasons for action. For 
debate and leadership in that sort the House must have 
a party organization and discipline such as it has never 
had. 

The Speaker of the House is its master—how abso- 
lutely members of the House have known these two 
generations and more; but the general public have only 
recently begun to find out. It has time out of mind 
been the custom among us to elevate the leader of the 
dominant party in the popular House to its Speakership 
—ever since Colonial times, when the Speaker of the 
Assembly was our spokesman against the domineering 
Governor and Council whom the Crown had appointed. 
We have long been familiar with the idea that, for some 
reason which we have not very carefully looked into, 
the presiding officer of our representative chamber is 
not a mere moderator, but also a guiding spirit in legis- 
lation: and so we have not very carefully noted the 
several steps by which he has come to be a sort of dic 
tator. In the first place, the House sifts and handles 
all its business by means of standing committees. 
Thousands of bills are presented for consideration 
every session; it would be impossible to consider them 
all, or even to vote upon them all, were the House to 
give itself up exclusively to voting. They naturally fall 
into classes, according to their subjects, and for each 
class there is a standing committee to which they are 
referred. But it is a critical matter for a bill that it 
should pass into the hands of a committee along with 
hundreds of other bills, relating to the same or like 
matter. It may be it will not come back alive. The 
committee is very likely to pocket most of the proposals 
sent it, and to modify the rest, and the net result is 
that all legislation in effect originates with the commit- 


348 COLLEGE AND STATE 


tees, or, at any rate, comes before the House unmistak- 
ably marked by their handling. 

And the Speaker appoints the committees. Of course 
he has not a perfectly free hand in the matter. Length 
and priority of service entitle certain members to certain 
chief posts of honor on the committee lists; and the 
Speaker, besides regarding their claims, must take coun- 
sel in some decent degree with the other leaders of his 
party before he finally makes up his mind whom he 
shall put upon the committees; but he none the less de- 
termines their make-up, and their make-up determines 
legislation. ‘That is the Speaker’s power of creation; 
and that is the reason the session disappoints the coun- 
try and discredits the party if the Speaker be not a con- 
summate party leader. 

But this is only a part of the Speaker’s power. He 
also retains control of the business of the House from 
day to day in a very autocratic manner. The rules of 
the House themselves in part determine what the course 
of business shall be. They give precedence to the re- 
ports of the committees which have charge of bills 
touching the raising and the spending of revenue; and 
they determine in what order and at what times the 
other committees shall be allowed to report. When im- 
portant matters pile up and it becomes necessary to fix 
a special order by which questions of the first conse- 
quence shall gain precedence and the docket be relieved 
of its congestion, the Committee on Rules is authorized 
to bring in a temporary programme for the purpose. 
But the Speaker appoints the Committee on Rules and 
is himself its chairman. He steers as well as presides. 

The rules are adopted afresh at the opening of every 
new Congress, with such modifications as the committee 
may have to suggest—and that committee is always the 
first to be appointed. Its regulations, alike in ordinary 
and in extraordinary cases, aim always at this single and 
consistent object—to keep business in the hands of the 
committee and rigidly exclude personal initiative on the 


COLLEGE AND STATE 349 


part of individual members. It requires unanimous 
consent for a member to get any matter before the 
House independently of the committees: and you can- 
not even ask for unanimous consent unless you can 
obtain recognition and get the floor. The Speaker’s 
eye is his own. He can see whom he pleases: and he 
must know your object before he will recognize you. 
If you do not know it, he will not see you. He will 
never see you even when he does know it, if he knows 
it to be something that will upset or interfere with party 
plans or the settled programme of the session—if only 
by taking up time. You may remonstrate with him and 
pray to him in private as you will, he will not let you 
cross the purposes he has in view as the leader of his 
party. Or, if, by reason of your importunity, he should 
at last seem to yield, and agree to accord you recogni- 
tion and a chance to make your motion, you may be 
sure he will take very good care to get some member’s 
promise that he will promptly object, and you will fail 
of unanimous consent and be silenced after all. 

Here, then, is your silent master of men and of poli> ° 
cies in the House, the Speaker, who appoints the com- 
mittees which originate legislation, determines the order 
of business at every critical point through the Com- 
mittee on Rules, and sees whom he will amongst those 
who would put themselves forward in the business of 
the House. I have not described him to condemn him. 
I do not see how else business could go forward in an 
assembly which would otherwise be a mere mass meet- 
ing. But I do wish to make it evident that this is an 
extraordinary picture, and that it sets our national 
legislature apart as unique among the representative 
assemblies of the world—unique in having its leader 
silent and in the form of his office a mere moderator, 
and in having its course of action determined by man- 
agement and not by debate. 

And what of leadership in the Senate? When you 
have described the House of Representatives you have 


350 COLLEGE AND STATE 


described but half of Congress, and that, Senators 
would say, the lower half. The Senate unquestionably, 
whatever we may say of the House of Representatives, 
stands unique among legislative bodies in the modern 
time. Whether we relish its uniqueness in the present 
generation quite as much as it was relished among our 
fathers is an open question, but its individuality is in- 
dubitable. ‘This singular body has assumed of late what 
I may, perhaps, be allowed to call a sort of Romo-Polish 
character. Like the Roman Senate, it has magnified its 
administrative powers and its right of negative in the 
great fields of finance and foreign affairs, as well as in 
all ordinary legislation; and, following Polish prece- 
dents, it has seemed to arrogate to its members the right 
of individual veto. Each Senator, like each prince of 
ancient Poland, insists, it would seem, upon consulting 
his own interests and preferences before he will allow 
measures to reach their final consideration and passage. 
In the field of administration, it seems plain, the Sen- 
ate expects the executive very generally to submit to its 
oversight and suggestion, as Roman magistrates sub- 
mitted to the Senate of their singular republic. 

I am anxious not to distort the true proportions of 
the picture, even in pleasantry; and, if to put the matter 
as I have just put it savours too much of exaggerating 
temporary tendencies into established practices, let us 
rest content with saying merely that this noted assembly 
has at almost every critical juncture of our recent po- 
litical history had an influence in affairs greater, much 
greater, than that of the House of Representatives; 
and that the methods by which this great council is led 
are likely to be of the utmost consequence to the nation 
at every turn in its fortunes. Who leads the Senate? 
Can any one say? It, too, has its standing committees, 
to which all of its business is in the first place sent, as 
to the committees of the House; but it accords them no 
such mastery as is accorded the committees of the 
House. Debate and amendment make free with com- 


COLLEGE AND STATE Ruy 


mittee reports, as with any other matter, and upon the 
open floor of the Senate no man is master. The Vice- 
President is an outsider, not the leader of his party— 
even if his party have the majority in the Senate—and 
generally not a very influential outsider—timid about 
asserting even the natural powers of a parliamentary 
moderator. Among the Senators themselves there is 
an equality as absolute as the equality of the sovereign 
states which they represent. It is give and take 
amongst them. Personal conferences are the only 
means for the adjustment of views and the compound- 
ing of differences. One Senator is as formidable as a “, 
dozen in the obstruction of business. The Senate asa \ 
whole is jealous of its dignity and of its prerogatives; 
and its members severally stand out distinct units in 
every matter of controversy. Who shall say who leads,v 
and who obeys amongst them? 

And so we have the composite thing which we call 
the Government of the United States. Its several parts 
are severally chosen; it is no unified and corporate 
whole. Its President is chosen, not by proof of leader- 
ship among the men whose confidence he must have if 
he is to play an effective part in the making of affairs, 
but by management—the management of obscure men. 
—and through the uncertain chances of an ephemeral 
convention which has no other part in politics. Its 
popular chamber shapes its affairs, not by conference 
with those who must execute the laws and show them 
feasible, nor yet by any clarifying process of debate, 
but chiefly by means of the silent management of its 
moderator, whose office is fixed for a two years’ term, 
and who represents, not the country, but a single con- 
stituency. Its Senate is a band of individuals, amongst 
whom it is impossible to maintain leadership, and to 
whom it is difficult to extend the discipline of party or- 
ganization. ‘This is not a government of systematic 
checks and balances,—a system of checks and balances 
would enable you to distinguish causes and calculate ef- 


352 COLLEGE AND STATE 


fects. It is a government without definite order, show- 
ing a confident interplay of forces, in which no man 
stands at the helm to steer, whose course is beaten out 
by the shifting winds of personal influence and popular 
opinion. 

On the whole, however, it has not worked ill, you will 
say; and what was good enough for our fathers is good 
enough for us. I heartily assent to the one proposition, 
but not to the other. A colonial government was once 
good enough for our fathers, if you will but go back 
so far; but it was not good enough for their sons, and 
our government as we use it is not as good as when they 
used it. Our fathers were choosing men, and so must 
we be. They chose governments to suit their circum- 
stances, not to suit their ancestors; and we must follow 
the like good rule—praying that we may choose wisely 
as they did. The colonial governments were not fail- 
ures so long as they were good enough to last; and 
certainly the Government of the United States has been 
no failure, but a success so conspicuous, for the most 
part, that the nations of the world have stood at gaze 
to see so great a thing done in the West, upon the new 
continent whither they supposed none but radicals had 
gone. You shall not find me uttering aught in dispraise 
of the great work of that memorable body of statesmen 
who met in Philadelphia in that year 1787, which they 
have made illustrious. They have won an imperishable 
name in the history of politics, and no man can take it 
away from them, were we churl enough to wish to do 
so. Neither shall you find me an advocate of radical 
changes. The men who made our government showed 
themselves statesmen in nothing so much as in this, 
that they adapted what they had to a new age; and we 
shall not be wise if we outrun their great example. But 
let us know the facts; and, if need be, fit our institutions 
to suit them. There is cowardice, sometimes, in mere 
self-satisfaction. 

The Government of the United States as we use it, 


COLLEGE AND STATE 353 


besides, is not the Government of the United States 
as they used it. Why is it that this leaderless character 
of our government did not disclose itself to an earlier 
generation as it has disclosed itself to us? ‘The govern-\ 
ment has the same formal structure now that it always 
has had: why has its weakness been so long concealed? 
Why can it not serve the new time as well as it served 
the old? Because the new time is not like the old—for 
us or any other nation; the changes which we have wit- 
nessed have transformed us. ‘The tasks set the gov- 
ernment now differ both in magnitude and in kind from 
those set it in days gone by. It is no old man’s fancy 
that the old days were different from those we now see, 
For one thing—and this can be no news to any man— 
an industrial revolution separates us from the times 
that went by no longer ago than when the war between 
the States came on; and that industrial revolution— 
like the war itself—has not affected all parts of the 
country alike—has left us more various and more un- 
equal, part by part, than ever before. We speak nowa- 
days of a new sectionalism, and I, for one, deprecate 
the phrase. I rejoice to believe that there are no longer 
any permanent sectional lines in this country. But there 
is an unprecedented diversification of interests—and for 
the time, no doubt, differences of interest mark also dif- 
ferences of region and of development. And these dif- 
ferences of condition and of economic growth as be- 
tween region and region, though temporary, are more 
sharply marked than they ever were before. More- 
over, there is a confused variety: region differs from 
region in an almost incalculable number of significant 
details. And there is added to this everywhere a swift 
process of change, a shifting of elements, a perplexing 
vicissitude in affairs. Here and there communities have 
a fixed life, and are still and quiet as of old, but these 
lie apart from the great forces that are making the na- 
tion, and the law is change. 

These things do not need demonstration; they hardly 


~N 


ff 


354 COLLEGE AND STATE 


need illustration. No man is so ill-informed as not to 
know that the conditions which existed before the war 
were simple and uniform the country through, as com- 
pared with those which have sprung up since the war. 
And where conditions are comparatively simple and 
uniform, constructive leadership is little needed. Men 
readily see things alike and easily come to a common 
opinion upon the larger sort of questions: or, at any 
rate, to two general opinions, widespread and definite 
enough to form parties on. For well-nigh a generation 
after the war, moreover, the problems which the gov- 
ernment of the Union had to settle were very definite 
problems indeed, which no man could mistake, and upon 
which opinion could readily be concentrated. I think 
the country sadly needed responsible and conscientious 
leadership during the period of Reconstruction, and it 
has suffered many things because it did not get it— 
things of which we still keenly feel the consequences. 
But the tasks, at least, were definite and unmistakable, 
and parties formed themselves upon sharp-cut issues. 
Since then, how has the scene changed! It is not now 
fundamental matters of structure and franchise upon 
which we have to centre our choice; but those general 


questions of policy upon which every nation has to exer- 


cise its discretion / ‘foreign policy, our duty to our neigh- 
bors, customs tariffs, coinage, currency, immigration, 
the law of corporations and of trusts, the regulation of 
railway trafic and of the great industries which supply 


tthe necessaries of life and the stuffs of manufacture. 
| These are questions of economic policy chiefly; and 


how shall we settle questions of economic policy except 
upon grounds of interest? Who is to reconcile our 
interests and extract what is national and liberal out 


“of what is sectional and selfish? ‘These are not ques- 


tions upon which it is easy to concentrate general opin- 
ion. It is infinitely difficult to effect a general enlighten- 
ment of the public mind in regard to their real merits 
and significance for the nation as a whole. Their settle- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 355) 


ment in any one way affects the several parts of the 
country unequally. They cannot be settled justly by a 
mere compounding of differences, a mere unguided inter- 
play of rival individual forces, without leadership and 
the courage of definite party action. Such questions 
are as complex and as difficult of adequate comprehen- 
sion as the now infinitely varied life of the nation itself; 
and we run incalculable risks in leaving their settlement 
to the action of a House of Representatives whose 
leaders are silent and do not tell up upon what principle 
they act, or upon what motive; to a Senate whose undis- 
ciplined members insist upon making each an individual 
contribution to the result; and to a President chosen by 
processes which have little or nothing to do with party 
organization or with the solution of questions of State. 
We can seldom in this way see a single year ahead of us. 

I, for my part, when I vote at a critical election, 
should like to be able to vote for a definite line of policy 
with regard to the great questions of the day—not for 
platforms, which Heaven knows, mean little enough— 
but for men known and tried in the public service; with 
records open to be scrutinized with reference to these 
very matters; and pledged to do this or that particular 
thing, to take definite course of action. As it is, I vote 
for nobody I can depend upon to do anything—no, not 
if I were to vote for myself. It may be that, if I vote 
with the successful party, my representative in the 
House is a perfectly honest, well-meaning, and more- 
over, able man; but how do I know upon which com- 
mittee Mr. Speaker will put him? How do I know 
where his influence will come in, in the silent play of in- 
fluences (it may be perfectly legitimate influences) that 
runs through the committee rooms in so heady a stream? 
How do I know what the Speaker and those with whom 
he takes counsel will let the House do? I do not vote 
for the Senators of my State: I do not always know 
just why those who do choose them make the particular 
selection they hit upon. When I vote for Presidential 


356 COLLEGE AND STATE 


electors, I know only what the candidate’s friends say 
that he will do. He accepts a platform made for him by 
a convention which he did not lead and which does not 
have to carry out its own programme; and I know that 
he may have no constructive power at all when he gets 
to Washington. No man can vote with real hope or 
confidence, or with intelligent interest even, under such 
a system. 

What would I have? I feel the embarrassment of 
the question. If I answer it, I make the unpleasant 
impression of posing as a statesman, and tempt those 
who wish to keep every man in his place to remind me 
that I am only a college professor, whom it would bet- 
ter become to stick to his legitimate business of describ- 
ing things as they are, leaving it to men of affairs to 
determine what they ought to be. I have been trying to 
describe things as they are, and that has brought me, 
whether I would or no, straight upon this question of 
the future. I am not addressing a college class, but 
men of affairs, who want their doctrine in the concrete 
and with no shirking of hard questions. Moreover, the 
things I have been describing are the proper objects of 
my study. In lecturing upon Politics I try, indeed, not 
to lecture as a politician; but I try also not to lecture as 
a fossil. I must study affairs of the day as well as things 
dead and buried and all but forgot. I remember, too, 
that this is not a convention, but a body of students. 
You will want from me, not a programme of reform, 
but a suggestion for thought. 

My studies have taught me this one thing with a 
definiteness which cannot be mistaken: Successful gov- 
ernments have never been conducted safely in the midst 
of complex and critical affairs except when guided by 
those who were responsible for carrying out and bring- 
ing to an issue the measures they proposed; and the 
separation of the right to plan from the duty to execute 
has always led to blundering and inefficiency; and mod- 
ern representative bodies cannot of themselves combine 


COLLEGE AND STATE 357 


_the two. The Roman Senate, the only efficient adminis- 
trative assembly that I know of in the history of the 
world, was a permanent body, made up for the most 
part of men who had served their terms as executive 
officials through a long succession of offices. It under- 
took actually to direct the affairs of the state, as our 
Houses do; but its members had had varied executive 
experience, and—what was of still more significance— 
its mistakes came back upon itself. “The shame of fail- 
ure fell upon it, and not upon those who were merely 
its agents. Moreover, it was a thoroughly national 
power: it stood for no constituencies; in its days of suc- 
cess it represented, not a divided, but a thoroughly 
homogeneous state. If you would have the present error 
of our system in a word, it is this, that Congress is the 
motive power in the government and yet has in it no- 
where any representative of the nation as a whole. Our 
Executive, on the other hand, is national; at any rate 
may be made so, and yet has no longer any place of 
guidance in our system. It represents no constituency, 
but the whole people; and yet, though it alone is na- 
tional, it has no originative voice in domestic national 
policy. 

The sum of the matter is, that we have carried the 
application of the notion that the powers of government 
must be separated to a dangerous and unheard-of length 
by thus holding our only national representative, the 
Executive, at arm’s length from Congress, whose very 
commission it seems to be to represent, not the people, 
but the communities into which the people are divided. 
We should have Presidents and Cabinets of a differ- 
ent calibre were we to make it their bounden duty to act 
as a committee for the whole nation to choose and 
formulate matters for the consideration of Congress 
in the name of a party and an Administration; and then, 
if Congress consented to the measures, what they are 
already—a committee to execute them—make them 
work and approve themselves practicable and wise. 


358 COLLEGE AND STATE 


And that is exactly what we ought to do. We should 
have not a little light thrown daily, and often when it 
was least expected, upon the conduct of the Depart- 
ments, if the heads of the Departments had daily to 
face the representatives of the people, to propose, de- 
fend, explain administrative policy, upon the floor of 
the Houses, where such a plan would put them: and 
heads of departments would be happy under such a sys- 
tem only when they were very straightforward and 
honest and able men. I am not suggesting that initia- 
tive in legislation be by any means confined to the Ad- 
ministration—that would be radical, indeed—but only 
that they be given a free, though responsible, share in 
it—and that, I conceive, would bring the government 
back very nearly to the conception and practice of Wash- 
ington. It would be a return to our first models of 
statesmanship and political custom. 

I ask you to put this question to yourselves: Should 
we not draw the Executive and Legislature closer to- 
gether? Should we not, on the one hand, give the in- 
dividual leaders of opinion in Congress a better chance 
to have an intimate part in determining who should 
be President, and the President, on the other hand, 
a better chance to approve himself a statesman, and his 
advisers capable men of affairs, in the guidance of 
Congress? This will be done when the Executive is 
given an authoritative initiative in the Houses. I see 
no other way to create national figures in the field in 
which domestic policy is chosen, or to bring forward 
tested persons to vote for. I do not suggest methods— 
this is not the place or the occasion; I suggest an idea 
—a way out of chaos: the nationalization of the motive 
power of the government, to offset the economic sec- 
tionalization of the country; I suggest the addition to 
Congress, which represents us severally, of a power, 
constituted how you will, which shall represent us col- 
lectively in the proposing of laws; which shall have the 
right as of course to press national motives and courses 


COLLEGE AND STATE 359 


of action to a vote in the Congress. This will not subor- 
dinate Congress; it may accept the proposals of the Ad- 
ministration or not, as it pleases (it once took a scolding 
from Washington himself for not accepting them) ; but 
the country will at least have a mouthpiece and not all of 
policy will lurk with committees and in executive ses- 
sions of the Senate. 


THE PURITAN 


SPEECH BEFORE THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY OF NEW 
YORK CITY, DECEMBER 22, I900. PROCEEDINGS 
PRINTED BY WILLIAM GREEN, NEW YORK, 1900, 


PP. 39-49. 
R. DODGE, Ladies and Gentlemen: I cannot but 


regard it as a whimsical fortune that a Scotch- 
Irishman should be brought here to pay tribute to the 
New England Society. The Scotch-Irishman is not fond 
of paying anything except his just debts, and there is 
always a certain risk in letting him speak his real mind. 
Mr. Dodge himself has given you some intimation of 
the risk he knows he is incurring by intimating to you— 
he was thinking of the Irish in me, I hope, rather than 
of the Scotch—that if I spoke long enough it would be a 
desecration of the Sabbath. 

And yet I believe, gentlemen, that nothing gives one 
strong race so much satisfaction as to pay its respects 
to another strong race. We came later to this continent 
than you did, but we had the better opportunity for 
observing your characters and the cut of your jibs. We 
saw how important was the task which you had half 
completed. We saw how necessary it was that certain 
other elements should be added which you had not con- 
tributed, and so we are here, gentlemen, and we don’t 
mind talking about it. We, like you, are beginning to 
form societies to annex the universe; we, like you, are 
beginning to elect memorialists who shall record how 
every line of strength in the history of the world is a 
line colored by Scotch-Irish blood. There is a great 
deal in that. [Laughter and applause.] I believe that 
it is necessary that races of different characters should 

360 


COLLEGE AND STATE 361 


exchange their ideas as well as their compliments, and 
that we should understand just what our relative parts 
are to be in the great game that we are to play upon this 
continent. The Puritan was—as Dr. Hadley has said 
—intensely human; but you will remember that he 
apologized to God as many as three times a day for 
the fact [laughter], and that it was an imperative part 
of his creed that he should root out diligently, in sea- 
son and out of season, the pestiferous elements of the 
flesh that were in him. [Laughter.] Now, I have no 
objection to the hatred that Dr. Hadley referred to. 
I believe in a certain degree of intolerance. It is an 
eminently comfortable indulgence. I believe that intol- 
erance can express itself, if not exactly as a dear old 
President of Princeton expressed it, at any rate, in 
more parliamentary form. I refer to that occasion 
when he brought all the strong flavor of his Scotch- 
Presbyterianism to a meeting of the Evangelical Alliance 
—one of the early gatherings of that interesting asso- 
ciation—when Dr. Huntington arose and proposed that 
they adopt the Apostles’ Creed as a platform upon 
which all could stand. ‘Tut! tut!’ said Dr. McCosh 
in an undertone, to a neighbor, ‘“‘I’ll not descend into 
hell with the Episcopalians.” [Laughter.] There is 
in this, gentlemen, the flavor and the definiteness which 
go with the Scotch character. 

I believe that if you will look into it you will find 
that you are worshipping your ancestors at a safe dis- 
tance. Dr. Hadley said that we had met this evening 
to celebrate your descent from those Fathers [laughter], 
and the old phrase came into my mind: Facilis descensus. 
It is not very much to your credit that you have de- 
scended; it will be to your credit if you ascend to the 
standards which they established. I sometimes recall 
when I think of the shock and the change which the 
Puritan principles underwent when they came to the 
City of New York [laughter], the story, half-pathetic 
and half-amusing, which is told of an old lady who, 


362 COLLEGE AND STATE 


unaccustomed to travel, boarded a train somewhere in 
the neighborhood of New Haven, coming in this direc- 
tion, and nervously asked the brakeman if that train 
stopped at Forty-second Street. ‘‘Well, ma’am, if it 
don’t, you’ll get the dumbdest bumping you ever got!” 
Now, I have sometimes thought that the New England 
principles, when they stopped at Forty-second Street, 
got the “dumbdest bumping” they ever got. [Laughter 
and applause. | 

And yet, seriously, gentlemen, there is a great deal 
which you have preserved besides your handsome per- 
sons. You have preserved what I may be allowed to 
call, in rhetorical phrase, a great deal of the old struc- 
tural iron, though you have changed a good deal about 
the exterior of the building and have employed new 
and French architects. I ask you to consider with me 
just what contribution it was that the Puritans seem 
to have made to the civilization of this country. Of 
course I can tell you. [Laughter.] That contribution 
is worth considering, because, having been obliged to 
read many of the historians of this country, and having 
found that most of them were also celebrating their 
descent from the Pilgrim Fathers, I have read in their 
pages, and for a long time believed, that the history of 
this country was the expansion of New England. If 
it was the expansion of New England, it was spread 
thin. [Laughter.] And having been born, as I was 
born, in the valley of Virginia, where they do not 
accept that view, except as heretical, I was led in my 
maturer years to question its validity. I did not see 
reason to believe that all the elements of this country 
came out of what was, after all, the not very productive 
soil of New England, because when I looked at the 
character of those Puritan men they seemed to me to 
stand for one single principle—a very splendid prin- 
ciple, I allow you, but, nevertheless, the single principle 
of discipline, of order, of polity. It was for the dis- 
cipline that pulls in harness; it was for subjection to 


COLLEGE AND STATE 363 


authority; it was for crucifixion of the things which did 
not comport with a fixed and rigid creed that they strove 
[for]. These men stood for the discipline of life. They 
did not stand for the quick pulses which have operated 
in some of the most momentous things that have taken 
place on this continent, but they stood for those lessons 
of duty which they read out of a Bible, interpreted in 
the light of a Calvinistic creed, cut in a definite pattern, 
not allowing elasticity of interpretation; which forced 
men to settle in different parts of New England, because, 
if they differed with each other, they had to go and live 
somewhere else [laughter]; they could not continue to 
live with each other. The churches of Massachusetts 
did indeed pay their tribute of respect, and very gener- 
ously, to Mr. Thomas Hooker, but Mr. Hooker found 
it more convenient to live at Hartford, and he lived at 
Hartford, because he did not like the doctrine of Mr. 
Cotton; because he did not like the doctrine of Mr. 
Wilson—a very respectable name; because he did not 
feel that there was just the sort of room for his doctrine 
in Newtown that there might be in the new places on 
the Connecticut. There is a sense in which the develop- 
ment of America is represented by the movement of 
people out of Massachusetts into that wild Cave of 
Adullam in Rhode Island whither all who were heret- 
ical, all who were discontented, all who were ungovern- 
able, betook themselves, and where they combined to 
form that fine, effervescent mixture which is more like 
the rest of the country than the plain, unmixed material 
of the places of older settlements. “Those men who 
struggled south through the Narragansett country, 
through the cold, forbidding woods, and made their 
new homes on the delightful prospects along the Bay 
of Narragansett—who made those places destined to 
have the distinction of containing the most fashionable 
summer resort in the United States—they represented 
that expulsive power of New England which certainly 
has been one of the causes of the growth of this country. 


364 COLLEGE AND STATE 


[Applause.] There is an application here for an old 
theme of Dr. Chalmers, who preached one of the great- 
est of his sermons on the subject: ‘The Expulsive 
Power of a New Affection.”’ These men got an affec- 
tion for new things, and they found that only old things 
would not be permitted in the places where they were 
living, and so they had to seek homes elsewhere. 

So when the race to which I belong landed on this 
continent and made its way in its principal migrations 
through the State of Pennsylvania and down through 
the Cumberland Valley and the valley of the Shenan- 
doah and into the country of the Southwest; and then 
crossed the mountains and was amongst the first to face 
the French on the Ohio, and, going with the vanguard 
of the whole movement, deployed at last upon the plains 
that led to the Great Valley of the Mississippi, it saw 
the thing which it remained for another principle than 
that of discipline to do—the principle of aspiration, the 
principle of daring, the principle of unrest, the principle 
of mere adventure, which made the level lines of the 
prairie seem finer and more inviting than the uplifted 
lines of the mountain; that made it seem as if the world 
were bigger on the plains, and as if the feet of young 
men were the feet of leaders. And this was a place 
where all those new things should be tried and all those 
ungoverned adventures should be made which filled this 
continent with an abounding life. For there is some- 
thing, gentlemen, of this balance in our lives between the 
discipline of restraint, the discipline of the old remind- 
ers of moral principle, and that uplifting power of an 
unregulated ambition. I believe that there is a sense, 
if you will permit me to say so in all soberness, in which 
there is a contrast between the New England spirit and 
the national spirit. You contributed something without 
which the national spirit would have simply set the world 
on fire, without being able to confine its power in piston 
rods to drive the heart of machines to make furnaces 
hold the abounding heat. You contributed the restraint 


COLLEGE AND STATE 365 


—that mechanical combination, that poise, that power 
of union, which is the spirit of discipline. But there 
was besides a national spirit which, if it had not received 
this restraint, would have broken all bonds. The 
spirit of progression is this spirit of aspiration which 
has led us into new conditions and to face a new des- 
tiny. [Applause. ] 

I pray that sober principle may ever be whispered at 
our ear, that we may be ever critical of our motives, 
that we may ever be self-examining men with regard to 
cur lives and conduct; but I also pray that that fine 
discipline of the heart may but precede the expansion 
of power; that that fine elevation and expansion of 
nature which ventures everything may go with us to the 
ends of the earth, so be it we go to the ends of the 
earth carrying conscience and the principles that make 
for good conduct. I believe that it is necessary that 
when we get reformers upon our platforms we should 
see that their function is properly spelled. [Applause. | 
Most of our reformers are retro-reformers. ‘They™ 
want to hale us back to an old chrysalis which we have 
broken; they want us to resume a shape which we have 
outgrown; they want us to take back the outward form 
of principles which they think cannot live in a new habil- 
iment, or prosper under new forms and conditions. It 
is not the forms of our lives; it is the principles of our 
lives that count. I can quote Scripture for this 
[laughter], though not Scripture which, I am afraid, 
would be regarded as exactly orthodox in Princeton. 
There was an old darky preacher who said, ‘The 
Lord said unto Moses, Come fo’th; and he came fifth, 
and lost the race.” [Great laughter.] Now, I think 
we ought to come forth, and not to come fifth and lose 
the race; and if we sufficiently obey this fine, expansive 
impulse in us we shall not make it necessary that we 
should forget the fine old discipline of ancient doctrine; 
we should not forget to have some sense of duty, some- 


366 COLLEGE AND STATE 


thing of a faith, some reverence for the laws ourselves 
have made. 

I believe that the principal menace of a democracy is 
that the disciplinary power of the common thought 
should overwhelm the individual instinct of man’s 
originative power, and that that individuality should 
be a little rubbed off and lost. I should wish to hear 
every man dare speak his thoughts. I should wish 
to have every man use a boldness, which I should also 
wish to see in the nation. I pray that the time may never 
come when we are not ready to do new things, when 
we are not ready to acknowledge that the age has 
changed. I suppose you have all heard Mr. Joseph 
Jefferson tell the story about the little boy who was 
to be taken by his mother to hear the play of “Rip 
Van Winkle.”’ His mother fell ill and could not take 
him, but rather than disappoint him she turned the ticket 
over to his aunt and asked her to take the lad. ‘‘But,”’ 
she said, ‘‘you must remember that he never has been 
to the theatre before, and you must explain things to 
him, as he cannot understand it.’’ But the aunt, being 
less solicitous than the mother, forgot all about the 
boy until the curtain went down on the young “Rip 
Van Winkle” and was about to rise on the old “Rip 
Van Winkle,” when it occurred to the aunt to say to 
the boy, “You know, Johnny, twenty years have gone 
by since the curtain went down.” He said, ‘‘Where’s 
my mamma?” [Laughter.] Now, that is the attitude 
of a great many people whom I very sincerely respect. 
You say to them, ‘“Twenty years have gone by since 
we fought Spain,” and they say, ‘‘Where are our 
papas?” [Laughter.] They go to consult a generation 
that did not know anything about it. They even take 
liberties with the Father of his Country. Now Wash- 
ington was a Virginian, and, perhaps, since I am a Vir- 
ginian, I may be allowed to interpret Washington. 
[Laughter.] We all know each other down there. 
[Applause.] When you reflect that Washington wrote 


COLLEGE AND STATE 367 


his Farewell Address to something over three million 
people, to whom he was, if his letters are to be believed, 
very willing to say good-bye [laughter], and if you 
will understand that Address to have meant, as it 
would seem to have meant: ‘I want you to discipline 
yourselves and stay still and be good boys until you 
erow up, until you are big enough to stand the com- 
petition of foreign countries, until you are big enough 
to go abroad in the world,” I think you will have put 
the proper interpretation on it. ‘‘Wait,” he said, ‘“‘un- 
til you need not be afraid of foreign influence, and 
then you shall be ready to take your part in the field 
of the world.” I do not accept the interpretation of 
Washington’s Farewell Address that those people who 
have but seen the curtain go down accept. [Laughter 
and applause. | 

Now, gentlemen, will you follow the Scotch-Irish 
across the continent and into the farther seas of the 
Pacific? Will you follow the Star of Empire with 
those men who will follow anything which they think 
will drop profit or amusement? [Laughter.] Are you 
ready, are we ready, to go shoulder to shoulder, for- 
getting our differences of origin, forgetting our fatal 
descent, forgetting all the things which might restrain 
us, not going with faces averted over shoulder, but 
going with faces to the front, faces that will scorn to 
face a shame but will dare to face a glory? [Applause. ] 


THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE SOUTHERN 
STATES 


FROM THE “ATLANTIC MONTHLY,” JANUARY, 1901, 
VOL UKXXVIT APP.) eles: 


T is now full thirty years, and more, since the proc- 
esses of Reconstruction were finished, and the south- 
ern states restored to their place in the Union. Those 
thirty years have counted for more than any other thirty 
in our history, so great have been the speed and range 
of our development, so comprehensive and irresistible 
has been the sweep of change amongst us. We have 
come out of the atmosphere of the ’sixties. The time 
seems remote, historic, not of our day. We have 
dropped its thinking, lost its passion, forgot its anxieties, 
and should be ready to speak of it, not as partisans, but 
as historians. 

Most troublesome questions are thus handed over, 
sooner or later, to the historian. It is his vexation that 
they do not cease to be troublesome because they have 
been finished with by statesmen, and laid aside as prac- 
tically settled. To him are left all the intellectual and 
moral difficulties, and the subtle, hazardous, responsible 
business of determining what was well done, what ill 
done; where motive ran clear and just, where clouded 
by passion, poisoned by personal ambition, or dark- 
ened by malevolence. More of the elements of every 
policy are visible to him than can have been visible to 
the actors on the scene itself; but he cannot always be 
certain which they saw, which they did not see. He 
is deciding old questions in a new light. He is danger- 
ously cool in dealing with questions of passion; too 
much informed about questions which had, in fact, to 

368 


COLLEGE AND STATE 369 


be settled upon a momentary and first impression; 
scrupulous in view of things which happened after- 
ward, as well as of things which happened before the 
acts upon which he is sitting in judgment. It is a won- 
der that historians who take their business seriously 
can sleep at night. 

Reconstruction is still revolutionary matter. Those 
who delve in it find it like a banked fire, still hot and 
fiery within, for all it has lain under the ashes a whole 
generation; and a thing to take fire from. It is hard 
to construct an argument here which shall not be heated, 
a source of passion no less than of light. And then 
the test of the stuff must be so various. The American 
historian must be both constitutional lawyer and states- 
man in the judgments he utters; and the American con- 
stitutional lawyer must always apply, not a single, but 
a double standard. He must insist on the plain, ex- 
plicit command and letter of the law, and yet he must 
not be impracticable. Institutions must live and take 
their growth, and the laws which clothe them must be 
no straitjacket, but rather living tissue, themselves con- 
taining the power of normal growth and healthful ex- 
pansion. The powers of government must make shift 
to live and adapt themselves to circumstances: it would 
be the very negation of wise conservatism to throttle 
them with definitions too precise and rigid. 

Such difficulties, however, are happily more formi- 
dable in the mass than in detail; and even the period of 
Reconstruction can now be judged fairly enough, with 
but a little tolerance, breadth, and moderation added 
to the just modicum of knowledge. Some things about 
it are very plain,n—among the rest, that it is a period 
too little studied as yet, and of capital importance in 
our constitutional history. Indeed, it is not too much 
to say that there crosses it, in full sight of every one 
who will look, a great rift, which breaks, and must 
always break, the continuity and harmony of our con- 
stitutional development. The national government 


370 COLLEGE AND STATE 


which came out of Reconstruction was not the national 
government which went into it. The civil war had given 
leave to one set of revolutionary forces; Reconstruction 
gave leave to another still more formidable. The effects 
of the first were temporary, the inevitable accompani- 
ments of civil war and armed violence; the effects of the 
second were permanent, and struck to the very centre of 
our forms of government. Any narrative of facts, how- 
ever brief, carries that conclusion upon its surface. 
The war had been fought to preserve the Union, 
to dislodge and drive out by force the doctrine of the 
right of secession. The southern states could not le- 
gally leave the Union,—such had been the doctrine of 
the victorious states whose armies won under Grant 
and Sherman,—and the federal government had been 
able to prevent their leaving, in fact. In strict theory, 
though their people had been in revolt, under organi- 
zations which called themselves states, and which had 
thrown off all allegiance to the older Union and formed 
a new confederation of their own, Virginia, North 
Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Missis- 
sippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas and Ten- 
nessee, the historic states once solemnly embodied in the 
Union, had never gone out of it, could never go out of 
it and remain states. In fact, nevertheless, their repre- 
sentatives had withdrawn from the federal House and 
Senate; their several governments, without change of 
form or personnel, had declared themselves no longer 
joined with the rest of the states in purpose or al- 
legiance, had arranged a new and separate partnership, 
and had for four years maintained an organized re- 
sistance to the armies of the Union which they had re- 
nounced. Now that their resistance had been overcome 
and their confederacy destroyed, how were they to be 
treated? As if they had been all the while in the Union, 
whether they would or no, and were now at last simply 
brought to their senses again, to take up their old- 
time rights and duties intact, resume their familiar 


COLLEGE AND STATE 371 


functions within the Union as if nothing had happened? 
The theory of the case was tolerably clear; and the Su- 
preme Court of the United States presently supplied 
lawyers, if not statesmen, with a clear enough formula- 
tion of it. The Constitution, it said (for example, in 
the celebrated case of Texas vs. White, decided in 
1868), had created an indestructible Union of inde- 
structible states. The eleven states which had attempted 
to secede had not been destroyed by their secession. 
Everything that they had done to bring about secession 
or maintain resistance to the Union was absolutely null 
and void, and without legal effect; but their laws passed 
for other purposes, even those passed while they were 
in fact maintaining their resolution of secession and de- 
fying the authority of the national government, were 
valid, and must be given effect to in respect of all the 
ordinary concerns of business, property, and personal 
obligation, just as if they had been passed in ordinary 
times and under ordinary circumstances. The states 
had lost no legitimate authority; their acts were invalid 
only in respect of what they had never had the right 
to do. 

But it was infinitely hard to translate such principles 
into a practicable rule of statesmanship. It was as 
dificult and hazardous a matter to reinstate the states 
as it would have been had their legal right to secede been 
first admitted, and then destroyed by the revolutionary 
force of arms. It became, whatever the theory, in fact 
a process of reconstruction. Had Mr. Lincoln lived, 
perhaps the whole of the delicate business might have 
been carried through with dignity, good temper, and 
simplicity of method; with all necessary concessions to 
passion, with no pedantic insistence upon consistent 
and uniform rules, with sensible irregularities and com- 
promises, and yet with a straightforward, frank, and 
open way of management which would have assisted to 
find for every influence its natural and legitimate and 
quieting effect. It was of the nature of Mr. Lincoln’s 


372 COLLEGE AND STATE 


mind to reduce complex situations to their simples, to 
guide men without irritating them, to go forward and 
be practical without being radical,—to serve as a genial 
force which supplied heat enough to keep action warm, 
and yet minimized the friction and eased the whole 
progress of affairs. 

It was characteristic of him that he had kept his own 
theory clear and unconfused throughout the whole strug- 
gle to bring the southern people back to their allegiance 
to the Union. He had never recognized any man who 
spoke or acted for the southern people in the matter 
of secession as the representative of any government 
whatever. It was, in his view, not the southern states 
which had taken up arms against the Union, but merely 
the people dwelling within them. State lines defined 
the territory within which rebellion had spread and 
men had organized under arms to destroy the Union; 
but their organization had been effected without color 
of law; that could not be a state, in any legal meaning 
of the term, which denied what was the indispensable 
prerequisite of its every exercise of political functions, 
its membership in the Union. He was not fighting 
states, therefore, or a confederacy of states, but only a 
body of people who refused to act as states, and could 
not, if they would, form another Union. What he 
wished and strove for, without passion save for the 
accomplishment of his purpose, without enmity against 
persons, and yet with burning hostility against what 
the southerners meant to do, was to bring the people 
of the southern states once more to submission and al- 
legiance; to assist them, when subdued, to rehabilitate 
the states whose territory and resources, whose very 
organization, they had used to effect a revolution; to do 
whatever the circumstances and his own powers, whether 
as President or merely as an influential man and earnest 
friend of peace, might render possible to put them 
back, defeated, but not conquered or degraded, into 
the old-time hierarchy of the Union. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 373 


There were difficulties and passions in the way which 
possibly even Mr. Lincoln could not have forced within 
any plan of good will and simple restoration; but he had 
made a hopeful beginning before he died. He had is- 
sued a proclamation of amnesty so early as 1863, offer- 
ing pardon and restoration to civil rights to all who 
would abandon resistance to the authority of the Union, 
and take the oath of unreserved loyalty and submission 
which he prescribed; and as the war drew to an end, 
and he saw the power of the Union steadily prevail, 
now here, now there, throughout an ever increasing 
area, he earnestly begged that those who had taken the 
oath and returned to their allegiance would unite in 
positive and concerted action, organize their states upon 
the old footing, and make ready for a full restoration 
of the old conditions. Let those who had taken the 
oath, and were ready to bind themselves in all good 
faith to accept the acts and proclamations of the fed- 
eral government in the matter of slavery,—let all, in 
short, who were willing to accept the actual results of 
the war, organize themselves and set up governments 
made conformable to the new order of things, and he 
would recognize them as the people of the states within 
which they acted, ask Congress to admit their repre- 
sentatives, and aid them to gain in all respects full ac- 
knowledgment and enjoyment of statehood, even though 
the persons who thus acted were but a tenth part of 
the original voters of their states. He would not insist 
upon even so many as a tenth, if only he could get some 
body of loyal citizens to deal and codperate with in this 
all-important matter upon which he had set his heart; 
that the roster of the states might be complete again, 
and some healing process follow the bitter anguish of 
the war. 

Andrew Johnson promptly made up his mind, when 
summoned to the presidency, to carry out Mr. Lincoln’s 
plan, practically without modification; and he knew 
clearly what Mr. Lincoln’s plan had been, for he himself 


374 COLLEGE AND STATE 


had restored Tennessee upon that plan, as the Presi- 
dent’s agent and representative. As military governor 
of the state, he had successfully organized a new govern- 
ment out of abundant material, for Tennessee was full 
of men who had had no sympathy with secession; and 
the government which he had organized had gone into 
full and vigorous operation during that very spring 
which saw him become first Vice President and then 
President. In Louisiana and Arkansas similar govern- 
ments had been set up even before Mr. Lincoln’s death. 
Congress had not recognized them, indeed; and it did 
not, until a year had gone by, recognize even Tennessee, 
though her case was the simplest of all. Within her 
borders the southern revolt had been, not solid and of 
a piece, but a thing of frayed edges and a very doubt- 
ful texture of opinion. But, though Congress doubted, 
the plan had at least proved practicable, and Mr. John- 
son thought it also safe and direct. 

Mr. Johnson himself, unhappily, was not safe. He 
had been put on the same ticket with Mr. Lincoln upon 
grounds of expediency such as have too often created 
Vice Presidents of the United States. Like a great 
many other Tennesseeans, he had been stanch and un- 
wavering in his adherence to the Union, even after his 
state had cast the Union off; but he was in all other 
respects a Democrat of the old order rather than a Re- 
publican of the new, and when he became President the 
rank and file of the Republicans in Congress looked upon 
him askance, as was natural. He himself saw to it, be- 
sides, that nobody should relish or trust him whom bad 
temper could alienate. He was self-willed, imperious, 
implacable; as headstrong and tempestuous as Jackson, 
without Jackson’s power of attracting men, and making 
and holding parties. At first, knowing him a radical 
by nature, some of the radical leaders in Congress had 
been inclined to trust him; had even hailed his accession 
to the presidency with open satisfaction, having chafed 
under Lincoln’s power to restrain them. ‘‘Johnson, we 


COLLEGE AND STATE 375 


have faith in you!” Senator Wade had exclaimed. ‘By 
the gods, there will be no trouble now in running the 
government!” But Johnson was careful that there 
should be trouble. He was determined to lead as Lin- 
coln had led, but without Lincoln’s insight, skill, or 
sweetness of temper,—by power and self-assertion 
rather than by persuasion and the slow arts of manage- 
ment and patient accommodation; and the houses came 
to an open breach with him almost at once. 

Moreover, there was one very serious and radical 
objection to Mr. Lincoln’s plan for restoring the states, 
which would in all likelihood have forced even him to 
modify it in many essential particulars, if not to aban- 
don it altogether. He had foreseen difficulties, himself, 
and had told Congress that his plan was meant to serve 
only as a suggestion, around which opinion might have 
an opportunity to form, and out of which some prac- 
ticable method might be drawn. He had not meant 
to insist upon it, but only to try it. The main difficulty 
was that it did not meet the wishes of the congressional 
leaders with regard to the protection of the negroes in 
their new rights as freemen. The men whom Mr. Lin- 
coln had called upon to reorganize the state govern- 
ments of the South were, indeed, those who were readi- 
est to accept the results of the war, in respect of the 
abolition of slavery as well as in all other matters. 
No doubt they were in the beginning men who had never 
felt any strong belief in the right of secession,—men 
who had even withstood the purpose of secession as 
long as they could, and had wished all along to see the 
old Union restored. They were a minority now, and 
it might be pretty safely assumed that they had been a 
minority from the outset in all this fatal business. But 
they were white men, bred to all the opinions which 
necessarily went along with the existence and practice of 
slavery. They would certainly not wish to give the 
negroes political rights. “They might be counted on, on 
the contrary, to keep them still as much as possible un- 


376 COLLEGE AND STATE 


der restraint and tutelage. They would probably ac- 
cept nothing but the form of freedom for the one-time 
slaves, and their rule would be doubly unpalatable to the 
men in the North who had gone all these weary years 
through, either in person or in heart, with the northern 
armies upon their mission of emancipation. 

The actual course of events speedily afforded means 
for justifying these apprehensions. Throughout 1865 
Mr. Johnson pushed the presidential process of recon- 
struction successfully and rapidly forward. Provisional 
governors of his own appointment in the South saw 
to it that conventions were elected by the voters who 
had taken the oath prescribed in the amnesty proclama- 
tion, which Mr. Johnson had reissued, with little change 
either of form or of substance; those conventions pro- 
ceeded at once to revise the state constitutions under 
the supervision of the provisional governors, who in 
their turn acted now and again under direct telegraphic 
instructions from the President in Washington; the sev- 
eral ordinances of secession were repealed, the war 
debts of the states were repudiated, and the legisla- 
tures set up under the new constitutions hastened to 
accept and ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, abolish- 
ing slavery, as the President demanded. By December 
of the very year of his inauguration, every southern 
state except Florida and Texas had gone through the 
required process, and was once more, so far as the 
President was concerned, in its normal relations with 
the federal government. ‘The federal courts resumed 
their sessions in the restored states, and the Supreme 
Court called up the southern cases from its docket. On 
December 18, 1865, the Secretary of State formally 
proclaimed the Thirteenth Amendment ratified by the 
vote of twenty-seven states, and thereby legally em- 
bodied in the Constitution, though eight of the twenty- 
seven were states which the President had thus of his 
own motion reconstructed. Without their votes the 


COLLEGE AND STATE 377 


amendment would have lacked the constitutional three- 
fourths majority. 

The President had required nothing of the new states 
with regard to the suffrage; that was a matter, as he 
truly said, in respect of which the several states had 
“rightfully exercised” their free and independent choice 
‘from the origin of the government to the present day”’; 
and of course they had no thought of admitting the 
negroes to the suffrage. Moreover, the new govern- 
ments, once organized, fell more and more entirely into 
the hands of the very persons who had actively partici- 
pated in secession. The President’s proclamation of 
amnesty had, indeed, excepted certain classes of persons 
from the privilege of taking the oath which would make 
them voters again, under his arrangements for recon- 
struction: those who had taken a prominent official part 
in secession, or who had left the service of the United 
States for the service of the Confederate government. 
But a majority of the southerners were still at liberty 
to avail themselves of the privilege of accepting the new 
order of things; and it was to their interest to do so, in 
order that the new arrangements might be shaped as 
nearly as possible to their own liking. What was to 
their liking, however, proved as distasteful to Congress 
as had been expected. ‘The use they made of their re- 
stored power brought absolute shipwreck upon the 
President’s plans, and radically altered the whole proc- 
ess of reconstruction. 

An extraordinary and very perilous state of affairs 
had been created in the South by the sudden and abso- 
lute emancipation of the negroes, and it was not strange 
that the southern legislatures should deem it necessary 
to take extraordinary steps to guard against the mani- 
fest and pressing dangers which it entailed. Here was 
a vast “laboring, landless, homeless class,” once slaves, 
now free; unpracticed in liberty, unschooled in self- 
control; never sobered by the discipline of self-support, 
never established in any habit of prudence; excited by 


378 COLLEGE AND STATE 


a freedom they did not understand, exalted by false 
hopes; bewildered and without leaders, and yet inso- 
lent and aggressive; sick of work, covetous of pleasure, 
—a host of dusky children untimely put out of school. 
In some of the states they outnumbered the whites,— 
notably in Mississippi and South Carolina. They were 
a danger to themselves as well as to those whom they 
had once served, and now feared and suspected; and 
the very legislatures which had accepted the Thirteenth 
Amendment hastened to pass laws which should put 
them under new restraints. Stringent regulations were 
adopted with regard to contracts for labor, and with 
regard to the prevention of vagrancy. Penalties were 
denounced against those who refused to work at the 
current rates of wages. Fines were imposed upon a 
great number and variety of petty offenses, such as the 
new freemen were most likely to commit; and it was 
provided that, in the (extremely probable) event of 
the non-payment of these fines, the culprits should be 
hired out to labor by judicial process. In some instances 
an elaborate system of compulsory apprenticeship was 
established for negroes under age, providing that they 
should be bound out to labor. In certain states the 
negroes were required to sign written contracts of labor, 
and were forbidden to do job work without first obtain- 
ing licenses from the police authorities of their places 
of residence. Those who failed to obtain licenses were 
liable to the charge of vagrancy, and upon that charge 
could be arrested, fined, and put to compulsory labor. 
There was not everywhere the same rigor; but there 
was everywhere the same determination to hold the 
negroes very watchfully, and, if need were, very sternly, 
within bounds in the exercise of their unaccustomed 
freedom; and in many cases the restraints imposed went 
the length of a veritable “involuntary servitude.” 
Congress had not waited to see these things done 
before attempting to help the negroes to make use of 
their freedom,—and self-defensive use of it, at that. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 379 


By an act of March 3, 1865, it established, as a branch 
of the War Department, a Bureau of Refugees, Freed- 
men, and Abandoned Lands, which was authorized and 
empowered to assist the one-time slaves in finding means 
of subsistence, and in making good their new privileges 
and immunities as citizens. The officials of this bureau, 
with the War Department behind them, had gone the 
whole length of their extensive authority; putting away 
from the outset all ideas of accommodation, and pre- 
ferring the interests of their wards to the interests of 
peaceable, wholesome, and healing progress. No doubt 
that was inevitable. What they did was but the final 
and direct application of the rigorous, unsentimental 
logic of events. The negroes, at any rate, had the full 
advantage of the federal power. A very active and 
oficious branch of the War Department saw to it that 
the new disabilities which the southern legislatures 
sought to put upon them should as far as possible be 
rendered inoperative. 

That, however, did not suffice to sweeten the temper 
of Congress. The fact remained that Mr. Johnson 
had rehabilitated the governments of the southern 
states without asking the leave of the Houses; that the 
legislatures which he had authorized them to call to- 
gether had sought, in the very same sessions in which 
they gave their assent to the emancipating amendment, 
virtually to undo the work of emancipation, substituting 
a slavery of legal restraints and disabilities for a slavery 
of private ownership; and that these same legislatures 
had sent men to Washington, to seek admission to the 
Senate, who were known, many of them, still openly 
to avow their unshaken belief in the right of secession. 
The southern voters, too, who had qualified by taking 
the oath prescribed by the President’s proclamation, 
had in most instances sent men similarly unconvinced 
to ask admission to the House of Representatives. Here 
was indeed a surrender of all the advantages of the con- 
test of arms, as it seemed to the radicals,—very gen- 


380 COLLEGE AND STATE 


erous, no doubt, but done by a Tennesseean and a Demo- 
crat, who was evidently a little more than generous; 
done, too, to exalt the Executive above Congress; in 
any light, perilous and not to be tolerated. Even those 
who were not radicals wished that the restoration of 
the states, which all admitted to be necessary, had been 
effected in some other way, and safeguarded against 
this manifest error, as all deemed it, of putting the 
negroes back into the hands of those who had been 
their masters, and would not now willingly consent 
to be their fellow citizens. 

Congress, accordingly, determined to take matters 
into its own hands. With the southern representatives 
excluded, there was a Republican majority in both 
houses strong enough to do what it pleased, even to 
the overriding, if necessary, of the President’s vetoes. 
Upon assembling for their regular session in December, 
1865, therefore, the House and Senate at once set up, 
by concurrent resolution, a joint committee of nine Rep- 
resentatives and six Senators, which was instructed to 
inquire into all the conditions obtaining in the southern 
states, and, after sufficient inquiry, advise the Houses 
upon the question whether, under the governments which 
Mr. Johnson had given them, those states were entitled 
to representation. ‘To this committee, in other words, 
was intrusted the whole guidance of Congress in the 
all-important and delicate business of the full rehabili- 
tation of the southern states as members of the Union. 
By February, 1866, it had virtually been settled that 
the admission of their representatives to Congress 
should await the action of the reconstruction commit- 
tee; and that purpose was very consistently adhered to. 
An exception was made in the case of Tennessee, but 
in her case only. The Houses presently agreed to be 
satisfied with her “reconstruction,” and admitted her 
representatives to their seats in both House and Senate 
by an act of the 24th of July, 1865. But the other 
states were put off until the joint committee had forced 


COLLEGE AND STATE 381 


them through a process of ‘‘Thorough,” which began 
their reconstruction at the very beginning, again, and 
executed at every stage the methods preferred by the 
Houses. ‘The leader throughout the drastic business 
was Mr. Thaddeus Stevens, of Pennsylvania, the chair- 
man of the committee, the leader of the House. He 
was foremost among the radicals, and drew a following 
about him, much as Stephen Douglas had attached 
thoroughgoing Democrats to himself, in the old days 
when the legislative battles were being fought over the 
extension of slavery into the territories,—by audacity, 
plain speaking, and the straightforward energy of un- 
hesitating opinion. He gave directness and speed to 
all he proposed. He understood better than Douglas 
did the coarse work of hewing out practicable paths 
of action in the midst of opinions and interests at odds. 
He had no timidity, no scruples about keeping to con- 
stitutional lines of policy, no regard or thought for the 
sensibilities of the minority,—being roughhewn and 
without embarrassing sensibilities himself,—an ideal 
radical for the service of the moment. 

Careful men, trained in the older ways of statesman- 
ship and accustomed to reading the Constitution into 
all that they did, tried to form some consistent theory 
ef constitutional right with regard to the way in which 
Congress ought to deal with this new and unprecedented 
situation. The southern states were still “‘states”’ within 
the meaning of the Constitution as the Supreme Court 
had interpreted it. They were communities of free 
citizens; each had kept its territorial boundaries un- 
changed, unmistakable; in each there was an organized 
government, ‘‘sanctioned and limited by a written con- 
stitution, and established by the consent of the gov- 
erned.” ‘Their officers of government, like their people, 
had for a time, indeed, repudiated the authority of the 
federal government; but they were now ready to ac- 
knowledge that authority again, and could resume their 
normal relations with the other states at a moment’s 


382 COLLEGE AND STATE 


notice, with all proper submission. Both Mr. Lincoln 
and Mr. Johnson had acted in part upon these assump- 
tions. They had objected only that the governments 
actually in existence at the close of the war had been 
chosen by persons who were in fact insurgents, and 
tliat their officers had served to organize rebellion. 
Let those citizens of the South who had made sub- 
mission, and who had been pardoned under the Presi- 
dent’s proclamation, reconstitute their governments, 
repudiating their old leaders, and the only taint upon 
their statehood would be removed: the Executive would 
recognize them as again normally constituted members 
of the Union. 

Not many members of Congress, however, accepted 
this view. ‘The Republican party, it was true, had en- 
tered upon the war emphatically disavowing either wish 
or purpose to interfere with the constitutional rights of 
the states; declaring its sole object to be the preserva- 
tion of the Union,—the denial of a single particular 
right which it could not but view as revolutionary. But 
war had brought many things in its train. The heat and 
struggle of those four tremendous years had burned 
and scarred the body of affairs with many an ineffaceable 
fact, which could not now be overlooked. Legally or 
illegally, as states or as bodies of individuals merely, 
the southern people had been at war with the Union; 
the slaves had been freed by force of arms; their free- 
dom had now been incorporated in the supreme law of 
the land, and must be made good to them; there was 
manifest danger that too liberal a theory of restoration 
would bring about an impossible tangle of principles, 
an intolerable contradiction between fact and fact. Mr. 
Sumner held that, by resisting the authority of the 
Union, of which they were members, the southern states 
had simply committed suicide, destroying their own 
institutions along with their allegiance to the federal 
government. ‘They ceased to be states, he said, when 
they ceased to fulfill the duties imposed upon them by 


COLLEGE AND STATE 383 


the fundamental law of the land. Others declined any 
such doctrine. They adhered, with an instinct almost 
of affection, to the idea of a veritable federal Union; 
rejected Mr. Sumner’s presupposition that the states 
were only subordinate parts of a consolidated national 
government; and insisted that, whatever rights they 
had for a time forfeited, the southern states were at 
least not destroyed, but only estopped from exercising 
their ordinary functions within the Union, pending a 
readjustment. 

Theories made Mr. Stevens very impatient. It made 
little difference with him whether the southern states 
had forfeited their rights by suicide, or temporary dis- 
organization, or individual rebellion. As a matter of 
fact, every department of the federal government, the 
courts included, had declared the citizens of those states 
public enemies; the Constitution itself had been for four 
years practically laid aside, so far as they were con- 
cerned, as a document of peace; they had been over- 
whelmed by force, and were now held in subjection 
under military rule, like conquered provinces. It was 
just as well, he thought, to act upon the facts, and let 
theories alone. It was enough that all Congressmen 
were agreed—at any rate, all who were allowed a voice 
in the matter—that it was properly the part of Con- 
gress, and not of the Executive, to bring order out of 
the chaos: to see that federal supremacy and federal 
law were made good in the South; the legal changes 
brought about by the war forced upon its acceptance; 
and the negroes secured in the enjoyment of the equality 
and even the privileges of citizens, in accordance with 
the federal guarantee that there should be a republican 
form of government in every state,—a government 
founded upon the consent of a majority of its adult sub- 
jects. The essential point was that Congress, the law- 
making power, should be in control. The President had 
been too easy to satisfy, too prompt, and too lenient. 
Mr. Stevens consented once and again that the lan- 


384 COLLEGE AND STATE 


guage of fine-drawn theories of constitutional right 
should be used in the reports of the joint Committee 
on Reconstruction, in which he managed to be master; 
but the motto of the committee in all practical matters 
was his motto of ‘“Thorough,” and its policy made Con- 
gress supreme. 

The year 1866 passed, with all things at sixes and 
sevens. So far as the President was concerned, most 
of the southern states were already reconstructed, and 
had resumed their places in the Union. ‘Their assent 
had made the Thirteenth Amendment a part of the Con- 
stitution. And yet Congress forbade the withdrawal 
of the troops, refused admittance to the southern rep- 
resentatives, and set aside southern laws through the 
action of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the military au- 
thorities. By 1867 it had made up its mind what to do 
to bring the business to a conclusion. 1866 had at least 
cleared its mind and defined its purposes. Congress 
had still further tested and made proof of the temper of 
the South. In June it had adopted a Fourteenth Amend- 
ment, which secured to the blacks the status of citizens, 
both of the United States and of the several states 
of their residence, authorized a reduction in the repre- 
sentation in Congress of states which refused them the 
suffrage, excluded the more prominent servants of the 
Confederacy from federal office until Congress should 
pardon them, and invalidated all debts or obligations 
‘incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against 
the United States’; and this amendment had been sub- 
mitted to the vote of the states which Congress had 
refused to recognize as well as to the vote of those rep- 
resented in the Houses. Tennessee had promptly 
adopted it, and had been as promptly admitted to rep- 
resentation. But the other southern states, as promptly 
as they could, had begun, one by one, to reject it. Their 
action confirmed the Houses in their attitude toward 
Reconstruction. 

Congressional views and purposes were cleared the 


COLLEGE AND STATE 385 


while with regard to the President, also. He had not 
been firm; he had been stubborn and bitter. He would 
yield nothing; vetoed the measures upon which Congress 
was most steadfastly minded to insist; alienated his 
very friends by attacking Congress in public with gross 
insult and abuse; and lost credit with everybody. It 
came to a direct issue, the President against Congress: 
they went to the country with their quarrel in the con- 
gressional elections, which fell opportunely in the au- 
tumn of 1866, and the President lost utterly. Until then 
some had hesitated to override his vetoes, but after that 
no one hesitated. 1867 saw Congress go triumphantly 
forward with its policy of reconstruction ab initio. 

In July, 1866, it had overridden a veto to continue 
and enlarge the powers of the Freedman’s Bureau, in a 
bill which directed that public lands should be sold to 
the negroes upon easy terms, that the property of the 
Confederate government should be appropriated for 
their education, and that their new-made rights should 
be protected by military authority. In March, 1867, 
two acts, passed over the President’s vetoes, instituted 
the new process of reconstruction, followed and com- 
pleted by another act in July of the same year. The 
southern states, with the exception, of course, of Ten- 
nessee, were grouped in five military districts, each of 
which was put under the command of a general of the 
United States. These commanders were made prac- 
tically absolute rulers, until the task of reconstruction 
should be ended. It was declared by the Reconstruction 
Acts that no other legal state governments existed in 
the ten states concerned. It was made the business of 
the district commanders to erect such governments as 
Congress prescribed. They were to enroll in each state, 
upon oath, all made citizens of one year’s residence, not 
disqualified by reason of felony or excluded under the 
terms of the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, ‘of 
whatever race, color, or previous condition” they might 
be; the persons thus registered were to choose constitu- 


386 COLLEGE AND STATE 


tional conventions, confining their choice of delegates 
to registered voters like themselves; these conventions 
were to be directed to frame state constitutions, which 
should extend the suffrage to all who had been per- 
mitted by the military authorities to enroll for the pur- 
pose of taking part in the election of delegates; and 
the constitutions were to be submitted to the same body 
of voters for ratification. When Congress had approved 
the constitutions thus framed and accepted, and when 
the legislatures constituted under them had adopted the 
Fourteenth Amendment, the states thus reorganized 
were to be readmitted to representation in Congress, and 
in all respects fully reinstated as members of the Union; 
but not before. Meanwhile, the civil governments al- 
ready existing within them, though illegal, were to be 
permitted to stand; but as “provisional only, and in 
all respects subject to the paramount authority of the 
United States at any time to abolish, control, or super- 
sede the same.’ 

Such was the process which was rigorously and con- 
sistently carried through during the memorable years 
1867-70; and upon the states which proved most difh- 
cult and recalcitrant Congress did not hesitate from 
time to time to impose new conditions of recognition 
and reinstatement before an end was made. By the 
close of July, 1868, the reconstruction and reinstatement 
of Arkansas, the two Carolinas, Florida, Alabama, and 
Louisiana had been completed. Virginia, Mississippi, 
and Texas were obliged to wait until the opening of 
1870, because their voters would not adopt the consti- 
tutions offered them by their reconstructing conven- 
tions; and Georgia was held off a few months longer, 
because she persisted in attempting to exclude negroes 
from the right to hold office. These four states, as a 
consequence, were obliged to accept, as a condition 
precedent to their reinstatement, not only the Four- 
teenth Amendment, but a Fifteenth also, which Con- 
gress had passed in February, 1869, and which forbade 


COLLEGE AND STATE 387 


either the United States or any state to withhold from 
any citizen the right to vote “‘on account of race, color, 
or previous condition of servitude.’”’ The military com- 
manders, meanwhile, used or withheld their hand of 
power according to their several temperaments. They 
could deal with the provisional civil governments as 
they pleased,—could remove officials, annul laws, regu- 
late administration, at will. Some were dictatorial and 
petty; some were temperate and guarded in their use 
of authority, with a creditable instinct of statesmanship ; 
almost all were straightforward and executive, as might 
have been expected of soldiers. 

Whatever their mistakes or weaknesses of temper or 
of judgment, what followed the reconstruction they 
effected was in almost every instance much worse than 
what had had to be endured under military rule. The 
first practical result of reconstruction under the acts of 
1867 was the disfranchisement, for several weary years, 
of the better whites, and the consequent giving over 
of the southern governments into the hands of the 
negroes. And yet not into their hands, after all. They 
were but children still; and unscrupulous men, ‘“‘carpet- 
baggers,’’—men not come to be citizens, but come upon 
an expedition of profit, come to make the name of Re- 
publican forever hateful in the South,—came out of 
the North to use the negroes as tools for their own self- 
ish ends; and succeeded, to the utmost fulfillment of 
their dreams. Negro majorities for a little while filled 
the southern legislatures; but they won no power or 
profit for themselves, beyond a pittance here and there 
for a bribe. Their leaders, strangers and adventurers, 
got the lucrative offices, the handling of the state moneys 
raised by loan, and of the taxes spent no one knew how. 
Here and there an able and upright man cleansed ad- 
ministration, checked corruption, served them as a real 
friend and an honest leader; but not for long. The 
negroes were exalted; the states were misgoverned and 
looted in their name; and a few men, not of their num- 


388 COLLEGE AND STATE 


ber, not really of their interest, went away with the 
gains. They were left to carry the discredit and reap 
the consequences of ruin, when at last the whites who 
were real citizens got control again. 

But that dark chapter of history is no part of our 
present story. We are here concerned, rather, with the 
far-reaching constitutional and political influences and 
results of Reconstruction. That it was a revolutionary 
process is written upon its face throughout; but how 
deep did the revolution go? What permanent marks 
has it left upon the great structure of government, fed- 
eral, republican; a partnership of equal states, and yet 
a solidly coherent national power, which the fathers 
erected? 

First of all, it is clear to every one who looks straight 
upon the facts, every veil of theory withdrawn, and 
the naked body of affairs uncovered to meet the direct 
question of the eye, that civil war discovered the founda- 
tions of our government to be in fact unwritten; set 
deep in a sentiment which constitutions can neither 
originate nor limit. The law of the Constitution reigned 
until war came. ‘Then the stage was cleared, and the 
forces of a mighty sentiment, hitherto unorganized, de- 
ployed upon it. A thing had happened for which the 
Constitution had made no provision. In the Constitu- 
tion were written the rules by which the associated states 
should live in concert and union, with no word added 
touching days of discord or disruption; nothing about 
the use of force to keep or to break the authority or- 
dained in its quiet sentences, written, it would seem, 
for lawyers, not for soldiers. When the war came, 
therefore, and questions were broached to which it gave 
no answer, the ultimate foundation of the structure 
was laid bare: physical force, sustained by the stern 
loves and rooted predilections of masses of men, the 
strong ingrained prejudices which are the fibre of every 
system of government. What gave the war its passion, 
its hot energy as of a tragedy from end to end, was 


COLLEGE AND STATE 389 


that in it sentiment met sentiment, conviction convic- 
tion. It was the sentiment, not of all, but of the effi- 
cient majority, the conviction of the major part, that 
won. A minority, eager and absolute in another convic- 
tion, devoted to the utmost pitch of self-sacrifice to an 
opposite and incompatible ideal, was crushed and over- 
whelmed. It was that which gave an epic breadth and 
majesty to the awful clash between bodies of men in all 
things else of one strain and breeding; it was that 
which brought the bitterness of death upon the side 
which lost, and the dangerous intoxication of an abso- 
lute triumph upon the side which won.- But it unmis- 
takably uncovered the foundations of force upon which 
the Union rested. 

It did more. ‘The sentiment of union and nationality, 
never before aroused to full consciousness or knowledge 
of its own thought and aspirations, was henceforth a 
new thing, aggressive and aware of a sort of conquest. 
It had seen its legions and felt its might in the field. 
It saw the very Constitution, for whose maintenance 
and defense it had acquired the discipline of arms, it- 
self subordinated for a time to the practical emergen- 
cies of war, in order that the triumph might be the 
more unimpeded and complete; and it naturally deemed 
nationality henceforth a thing above law. As much as 
possible,—so far as could be without serious embarrass- 
ment,—the forms of the fundamental law had indeed 
been respected and observed; but wherever the law 
clogged or did not suffice, it had been laid aside and 
ignored. It was so much the easier, therefore, to heed 
its restrictions lightly, when the war was over, and it 
became necessary to force the southern states to accept 
the new model. ‘The real revolution was not so much 
in the form as in the spirit of affairs. The spirit. and 
temper and method of a federal Union had given place, 
now that all the spaces of the air had been swept and 
changed by the merciless winds of war, to a spirit which 
was consciously national and of a new age. 


390 COLLEGE AND STATE 


It was this spirit which brushed theories and tech- 
nicalities aside, and impressed its touch of revolution 
on the law itself. And not only upon the law, but also 
upon the processes of lawmaking, and upon the relative 
positions of the President and Congress in the general 
constitutional scheme of the government, seeming to 
change its very administrative structure. While the 
war lasted the President had been master; the war 
ended, and Mr. Lincoln gone, Congress pushed its way 
to the front, and began to transmute fact into law, law 
into fact. In some matters it treated all the states 
alike. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth 
amendments bound all the states at once, North and 
West as well as South. But that was, after all, a mere 
equality of form. The amendments were aimed, of 
course, at the states which had had slaves and had at- 
tempted secession, and did not materially affect any 
others. ‘The votes which incorporated them in the Con- 
stitution were voluntary on the part of the states whose 
institutions they did not affect, involuntary on the part 
of the states whose institutions they revolutionized. 
These states were then under military rule. Congress 
had declared their whole political organization to be 
illegal; had excluded their representatives from their 
seats in the Houses; and yet demanded that they assent, 
as states, to the amendment of the Constitution as a 
condition precedent to their reinstatement in the Union! 
No anomaly or contradiction of lawyers’ terms was 
suffered to stand in the way of the supremacy of the 
lawmaking branch of the general government. The 
Constitution knew no such process as this of Recon- 
struction, and could furnish no rules for it. “Fwo years 
and a half before the Fifteenth Amendment was adopted 
by Congress, three years and a half before it was 
put in force by its adoption by the states, Congress had 
by mere act forced the southern states, by the hands of 
military governors, to put the negroes upon the roll 
of their voters. It had dictated to them a radical re- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 391 


vision of their constitutions, whose items should be 
framed to meet the views of the Houses rather than 
the views of their own electors. It had pulled about 
and rearranged what local institutions it saw fit, 
and then had obliged the communities affected to ac- 
cept its alterations as the price of their reinstatement 
as self-governing bodies politic within the Union. 

It may be that much, if not all, of this would have 
been inevitable under any leadership, the temper of the 
times and the postures of affairs being what they were; 
and it is certain that it was inevitable under the actual 
circumstances of leadership then existing at Washing- 
ton. But to assess that matter is to reckon with causes. 
For the moment we are concerned only with conse- 
quences, and are neither justifying nor condemning, but 
only comprehending. ‘The courts of the United States 
have held that the southern states never were out of the 
Union; and yet they have justified the action of Con- 
gress throughout the process of Reconstruction, on the 
ground that it was no more than a proper performance 
by Congress of a legal duty, under the clause of the 
Constitution which guarantees to every state a repub- 
lican form of government. It was making the southern 
governments republican by securing full standing and 
legislative representation as citizens for the negroes. 
But Congress went beyond that. It not only dictated 
to the states it was reconstructing what their suffrage 
should be; it also required that they should never after- 
ward narrow the suffrage. It required of Virginia, 
Texas, and Mississippi that they should accord to the 
negroes not only the right to vote, but also the right 
to hold political office; and that they should grant to 
all their citizens equal school privileges, and never 
afterward abridge them. So far as the right to vote 
was concerned, the Fifteenth Amendment subsequently 
imposed the same disability with regard to withholding 
the suffrage upon all the states alike; but the southern 
states were also forbidden by mere federal statute to 


392 COLLEGE AND STATE 


restrict it on any other ground; and in the cases of Vir- 
ginia, Mississippi, and Texas Congress assumed the 
right, which the Constitution nowhere accorded it, to 
regulate admission to political office and the privileges of 
public education. 

South Carolina and Mississippi, Louisiana and North 
Carolina, have since changed the basis of their suffrage, 
notwithstanding; Virginia and Mississippi and Texas 
might now, no doubt, reorganize their educational sys- 
tem as they pleased, without endangering their status 
in the Union, or even meeting rebuke at the hands of 
the federal courts. The temper of the times has 
changed; the federal structure has settled to a normal 
balance of parts and functions again; and the states are 
in fact unfettered except by the terms of the Constitu- 
tion itself. It is marvellous what healing and oblivion 
peace has wrought, how the traces of Reconstruction 
have worn away. But a certain deep effect abides. It 
is within, not upon the surface. It is of the spirit, not 
of the body. A revolution was carried through when 
war was done which may be better comprehended if li- 
kened to England’s subtle making over, that memorable 
year 1688. ‘Though she punctiliously kept to the forms 
of her law, England then dismissed a king almost as, 
in later years, she would have dismissed a minister; 
though she preserved the procedure of her constitution 
intact, she in fact gave a final touch of change to its 
spirit. She struck irresponsible power away, and made 
her government once for all a constitutional government. 
The change had been insensibly a-making for many a 
long age; but now it was accomplished consciously and 
at a stroke. Her constitution, finished, was not what 
it had been until this last stroke was given,—when silent 
forces had at last found sudden voice, and the culminat- 
ing change was deliberately made. 

Nearly the same can be said of the effect of the war 
and of the reconstruction of the southern states upon our 
own government. It was a revolution of consciousness, 


COLLEGE AND STATE 393 


—of mind and purpose. A government which had been 
in its spirit federal became, almost of a sudden, national 
in temper and point of view. ‘The national spirit had 
long been a-making. Many a silent force, which grew 
quite unobserved, from generation to generation, in per- 
vasiveness and might, in quiet times of wholesome peace 
and mere increase of nature, had been breeding these 
thoughts which now sprang so vividly into conscious- 
ness. The very growth of the nation, the very lapse 
of time and uninterrupted habit of united action, the 
mere mixture and movement and distribution of popula- 
tions, the mere accretions of policy, the mere consol- 
idation of interests, had been building and strengthening 
new tissue of nationality the years through, and draw- 
ing links stronger than links of steel round about the 
invisible body of common thought and purpose which is 
the substance of nations. When the great crisis of seces- 
sion came, men knew at once how their spirits were 
ruled, men of the South as well as men of the North,— 
in what institutions and conceptions of government their 
blood was fixed to run; and a great and instant readjust- 
ment took place, which was for the South, the minority, 
practically the readjustment of conquest and fundamen- 
tal reconstruction, but which was for the North, the 
region which had been transformed, nothing more than 
an awakening. 

It cannot be said that the forms of the Constitution 
were observed in this quick change as the forms of the 
English constitution had been observed when the Stuarts 
were finally shown the door. There were no forms for 
such a business. For several years, therefore, Congress 
was permitted to do by statute what, under the long- 
practiced conceptions of our federal law, could properly 
be done only by constitutional amendment. The neces- 
sity for that gone by, it was suffered to embody what it 
had already enacted and put into force as law into the 
Constitution, not by the free will of the country at large, 
but by the compulsions of mere force exercised upon a 


394 COLLEGE AND STATE 


minority whose assent was necessary to the formal com- 
pletion of its policy. The result restored, practically 
entire, the forms of the Constitution; but not before 
new methods and irregular, the methods of majorities, 
but not the methods of law, had been openly learned 
and practiced, and learned in a way not likely to be 
forgot. Changes of law in the end gave authentic body 
to many of the most significant changes of thought 
which had come, with its new consciousness, to the 
nation. A citizenship of the United States were created; 
additional private civil rights were taken within the 
jurisdiction of the general government; additional pro- 
hibitions were put upon the states; the suffrage was ina 
measure made subject to national regulation. But the 
real change was the change of air,—a change of con- 
ception with regard to the power of Congress, the 
guiding and compulsive efficacy of national legislation, 
the relation of the life of the land to the supremacy of 
the national lawmaking body. All policy thenceforth 
wore a different aspect. 

We realize it now, in the presence of novel enter- 
prises, at the threshold of an unlooked-for future. It 
is evident that empire is an affair of strong government, 
and not of the nice and somewhat artificial poise or of 
the delicate compromises of structure and authority 
characteristic of a mere federal partnership. Undoubt- 
edly, the impulse of expansion is the natural and whole- 
some impulse which comes with a consciousness of ma- 
tured strength; but it is also a direct result of that 
national spirit which the war between the states cried 
so wide awake, and to which the processes of Recon- 
struction gave the subtle assurance of practically unim- 
peded sway and a free choice of means. ‘The revolution 
lies there, as natural as it was remarkable and full of 
prophecy. It is this which makes the whole period of 
Reconstruction so peculiarly worthy of our study. Every 
step of the policy, every feature of the time, which 


COLLEGE AND’ STATE 395 


wrought this subtle transformation, should receive our 
careful scrutiny. We are now far enough removed 
from the time to make that scrutiny both close and dis- 
passionate. A new age gives it a new significance, 


DEMOCRACY AND EFFICIENCY 


FROM THE “ATLANTIC MONTHLY,” MARCH, I9OI, VOL. 
LXXXVII, PP. 289-299. 


|G is no longer possible to mistake the reaction against 
democracy. The nineteenth century was above all 
others a century of democracy; and yet the world is no 
more convinced of the benefits of democracy as a form 
of government at its end than it was at its beginning. 
The history of closeted Switzerland has not been ac- 
cepted as proving the stability of democratic institu- 
tions; the history of the United States has not been 
accepted as establishing their tendency to make govern- 
ments just and liberal and pure. Their eccentric influ- 
ence in France, their disastrous and revolutionary opera- 
tion in South America, their. power to intoxicate and 
their powerlessness to reform,—except where the states 
which use them have had in their training and environ- 
ment what Switizerland or the colonies and common- 
wealths sprung from England have had, to strengthen 
and steady them,—have generally been deemed to offset 
every triumph or success they can boast. When we 
praise democracy, we are still put to our proofs; when 
we excuse its errors, we are understood to have admitted 
its failure. 

There need be in this, however, no serious discourage- 
ment for us, whose democratic institutions have in all 
large things succeeded. It means nothing more than 
that the world is at last ready to accept the moral long 
ago drawn for it by de Tocqueville. He predicted the 
stability of the government of the United States, not 
because of its intrinsic excellence, but because of its 
suitability to the particular social, economic, and polit- 

396 


COLLEGE AND STATE 397 


ical conditions of the people and the country for whose 
use and administration it had been framed; because of 
the deliberation and sober sagacity with which it had 
been devised and set up; because it could reckon upon 
a sufficient ‘‘variety of information and excellence of dis- 
cretion”’ on the port of the people who were to live under 
it to insure its intelligent operation; because he observed 
a certain uniformity of civilization to obtain throughout 
the country, and saw its affairs steadied by their for- 
tunate separation from European politics; because he 
found a sober, religious habit of thought among our 
people, and a clear sense of right. Democracy was with 
us, he perceived, already a thing of principle and cus- 
tom and nature, and our institutions admirably expressed 
our training and experience. No other people could 
expect to succeed by the same means, unless those means 
equally suited their character and stage of development. 
Democracy, like every other form of government, de- 
pended for its success upon qualities and conditions 
which it did not itself create, but only obeyed. 

Many excellent suggestions, valid and applicable 
everywhere, we have given the world, with regard to 
the spirit in which government should be conducted. No 
doubt class privilege has been forever discredited be- 
cause of our example. We have taught the world the 
principle of the general welfare as the object and end of 
government, rather than the prosperity of any class or 
section of the nation, or the preferment of any private 
or petty interest. We have made the law appear to all 
men an instrument wherewith to secure equality of rights 
and a protection which shall be without respect of per- 
sons. There can be no misgivings about the currency 
or the permanency of the principles of right which we 
have exalted. But we have not equally commended the 
forms or the organizations of the government ‘under 
which we live. 

A federal union of diverse commonwealths we have 
indeed made to seem both practicable and efficient as a 


398 COLLEGE AND STATE 


means of organizing government on a great scale, while 
preserving at the same time the utmost possible latitude 
and independence in local self-government. Germany, 
Canada, Australia, Switzerland herself, have built and 
strengthened their constitutions in large part upon our 
model. It would be hard to exaggerate the shock which 
has been given to old theories, or the impetus which has 
been given to hopeful experiment, in the field of political 
action, by our conspicuous successes as constitution- 
makers and reformers. But those successes have not 
been unlimited. We have not escaped the laws of error 
that government is heir to. It is said that riots and dis- 
orders are more frequent amongst us than in any other 
country of the same degree of civilization; justice is 
not always done in our courts; our institutions do not 
prevent, they do not seem even to moderate, contests 
between capital and labor; our laws of property are no 
more equitable, our laws of marriage no more moral- 
izing, than those of undemocratic nations, our contem- 
poraries; our cities are perhaps worse governed than 
any in Europe outside the Turkish Empire and Spain; 
crime defies or evades the law amongst us as amongst 
other peoples, less favored in matters of freedom and 
privilege; we have no monopoly either of happiness or 
of enlightened social order. As we grow older, we grow 
also perplexed and awkward in the doing of justice and 
in the perfecting and safeguarding of liberty. It is 
character and good principle, after all, which are to 
save us, if we are to escape disaster. 

That moral is the justification of what we have at- 
tempted. It is for this that we love democracy: for the 
emphasis it puts on character; for its tendency to exalt 
the purposes of the average man to some high level of 
endeavor; for its just principle of common assent in 
matters in which all are concerned; for its ideals of duty 
_and its sense of brotherhood. Its forms and institutions 
‘ are meant to be subservient to these things. Democracy 
is merely the most radical form of “‘constitutional”’ gov- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 399 


ernment. A “constitutional” government is one in which 
there is a definite understanding as to the sphere and 
powers of government; one in which individual liberty 
is defined and guaranteed by specific safeguards, in which 
the authority and the functions of those who rule are 
limited and determined by unmistakable custom or ex- 
plicit fundamental law. It is a government in which 
these understandings are kept up, alike in the making 
and in the execution of laws, by frequent conferences. 
between those who govern and those who are governed. 
This is the purpose of representation: stated conference 
and a cordial agreement between those who govern and 
those who are governed. ‘The process of the under- 
standing is discussion,—public and continuous, and con- 
ducted by those who stand in the midst of affairs, at the 
official centre and seat of management, where affairs 
can be looked into and disposed with full knowledge 
and authority; those intrusted with government being 
present in person, the people by deputy. 

Representative government has had its long life and 
excellent development, not in order that common opin- 
ion, the opinion of the street, might prevail, but in order 
that the best opinion, the opinion generated by the best 
possible methods of general counsel, might rule in 
affairs; in order that some sober and best opinion might 
be created, by thoughtful and responsible discussion con- 
ducted by men intimately informed concerning the public 
weal, and officially commissioned to look to its safe- 
guarding and advancement,—by discussion in parlia- 
ments, discussion face to face between authoritative 
critics and responsible ministers of state. 

This is the central object to which we have devoted 
our acknowledged genius for practical politics. During 
the first half century of our national life we seemed to 
have succeeded in an extraordinary degree in approach- 
ing our ideal, in organizing a nation for counsel and co- 
operation, and in moving forward with cordial unison 
and with confident and buoyant step toward the accom- 


400 COLLEGE AND STATE 


plishment of tasks and duties upon which all were 
agreed. Our later life has disclosed serious flaws, has 
even seemed ominous of pitiful failure, in some of the 
things we most prided ourselves upon having managed 
well: notably, in pure and efficient local government, in 
the successful organization of great cities, and in well- 
considered schemes of administration. The boss—a 
man elected by no votes, preferred by no open process of 
choice, occupying no office of responsibility—makes him- 
self a veritable tyrant amongst us, and seems to cheat 
us of self-government; parties appear to hamper the 
movements of opinion rather than to give them form 
and means of expression; multitudinous voices of agita- 
tion, an infinite play of forces at cross-purpose, confuse 
us; and there seems to be no common counsel or definite 
union for action, after all. 

We keep heart the while because still sure of our 
principles and of our ideals: the common weal, a com- 
mon and cordial understanding in matters of govern- 
ment, secure private rights and yet concerted public 
action, a strong government and yet liberty also. We 
know what we have to do; what we have missed and 
mean to find; what we have lost and mean to recover; 
what we still strive after and mean to achieve. Democ- 
racy is a principle with us, not a mere form of govern- 
ment. What we have blundered at is its new applica- 
tions and details, its successful combination with eff- 
ciency and purity in governmental action. We tell our- 
selves that our partial failure in these things has been 
due to our absorption in the tasks of material growth, 
that our practical genius has spent itself upon wealth 
and the organization of industry. But it is to be sus- 
pected that there are other elements in the singular fact. 
We have supposed that there could be one way of effi- 
ciency for democratic governments and another for mon- 
archial. We have declined to provide ourselves with a 
professional civil service, because we deemed it undemo- 
cratic; we have made shift to do without a trained 


COLLEGE AND STATE 401 


diplomatic and consular service, because we thought 
the training given by other governments to their foreign 
agents unnecessary in the case of affairs so simple and 
unsophisticated as the foreign relations of a democracy 
in politics and trade,—transactions so frank, so open, 
so straightforward, interests so free from all touch of 
chicane or indirection; we have hesitated to put our 
presidents or governors or mayors into direct and re- 
sponsible relations of leadership with our legislatures 
and councils in the making of laws and ordinances, be- 
cause such a connection between lawmakers and execu- 
tive officers seemed inconsistent with the theory of checks 
and balances whose realization in practice we understood 
Montesquieu to have proved essential to the maintenance 
of a free government. Our theory, in short, has paid 
as little heed to efficiency as our practice. It has been 
a theory of non-professionalism in public affairs; and in 
many great matters of public action Rom prorsecionelien 
is non-efficiency. / 

“Tf only we had our old leisure for domestic affairs, 
we should devise a way of our own to be efficient, con- 
sonant with our principles, characteristic of our genius 
for organization,” we have heard men say. ‘‘How fatal 
it may prove to us that our attention has been called off 
from a task but half done to the tasks of the world, for 
which we have neither inclination nor proper training 
nor suitable organization,—from which, until now, we 
were so happily free! We shall now be forever barred 
from perfection, our own perfection, at home!’’ But 
may it not be that the future will put another face upon 
the matter, and show us our advantage where least we 
thought it to lie? May it not be that the way to perfec. 
tion lies along these new paths of struggle, of discipline, 
and of achievement? What will the reaction of new 
duty be? What self-revelations will it afford; what 
lessons of unified will, of simplified method, of clarified 
purpose; what disclosures of the fundamental principles 


402 COLLEGE AND STATE 


of right action, the efficient means of just achievement, 
if we but keep our ideals and our character? 

At any rate, it is clear that we could not have held 
off. The affairs of the world stand in such a case, the 
principles for which we have battled the long decades 
through are now put in such jeopardy amidst the con- 
tests of nations, the future of mankind faces so great a 
peril of reactionary revolution, that our own private 
business must take its chances along with the greater 
business of the world at large. We dare not stand 
neutral. All mankind deem us the representatives of 
the moderate and sensible discipline which makes free 
men good citizens, of enlightened systems of law and a 
temperate justice, of the best experience in the reason- 
able methods and principles of self-government, of 
public force made consistent with individual liberty; 
and we shall not realize these ideals at home, if we suffer 
them to be hopelessly discredited amongst the peoples 
who have yet to see liberty and the peaceable days of 
order and comfortable progress. We should lose heart 
ourselves, did we suffer the world to lose faith in us as 
the champions of these things. 

There is no masking or concealing the new order of 
the world. It is not the world of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, nor yet of the nineteenth. A new era has come 
upon us like a sudden vision of things unprophesied, and 
for which no polity has been prepared. Here is straight- 
way a new frontage for the nations,—this frontage to- 
ward the Orient. Our almost accidental possession of 
the Philippines has put us in the very presence of the 
forces which must make the politics of the twentieth 
century radically unlike the politics of the nineteenth; 
but we must have taken cognizance of them and dealt 
with them in any event. ‘They concern us as nearly as 
they concern any other nation in the world. They 
concern all nations, for they shall determine the future 
of the race. Fortunately, they have not disclosed them- 
selves before we were ready. I do not mean that our 


COLLEGE AND STATE 403 


thought was prepared for them; I do not mean that our 
domestic affairs were in such shape as to seem fairly well 
ordered, so that we might in good conscience turn from 
them as from things finished and complete, and divert 
our energies to tasks beyond our borders. I mean that 
this change in the order of the world came, so far as we 
are concerned, at the natural point in our national de- 
velopment. ‘The matter is worth looking into. 

There has been a certain singular unity in our national 
task, hitherto; and these new duties now thrust upon us 
will not break that unity. They will perpetuate it, 
rather, and make it complete, if we keep but our integ- 
rity and our old-time purpose true. Until 1890 the 
United States had always a frontier; looked always to 
a region beyond, unoccupied, unappropriated, an outlet 
for its energy, a new place of settlement and of achieve- 
ment for its people. For nearly three hundred years 
their growth had followed a single law,—the law of 
expansion into new territory. Themselves through all 
their history a frontier, the English colonies in America 
grew into a nation whose life poured still with strong 
tide along the old channel. Over the mountains on to 
the long slopes that descended to the Mississippi, across 
the great river into the plains, up the plains to the 
crowning heights of the Rockies, beyond the Rockies 
to the Pacific, slowly moved the frontier nation. Eng- 
land sought colonies at the ends of the earth to set 
her energy free and give vent to her enterprise; we, 
a like people in every impulse of mastery and achieve- 
ment, had our own vast continent and were satisfied. 
There was always space and adventure enough and to 
spare, to satisfy the feet of our young men. 

The great process put us to the making of states; 
kept the wholesome blood of sober and strenuous and 
systematic work warm within us; perpetuated in us the 
spirit of initiative and of practical expediency which had 
made of the colonies vigorous and heady states; created 
in us that national feeling which finally put sectionalism 


404 COLLEGE AND STATE 


from the field and altered the very character of the 
government; gave us the question of the extension of 
slavery, brought on the civil war, and decided it by 
the weight of the West. From coast to coast across the 
great continent our institutions have spread, until the 
western sea has witnessed the application upon a great 
scale of what was begun upon a small scale on the 
shores of the Atlantic, and the drama has been played 
almost to its last act,—the drama of institutional con- 
struction on the vast scale of a continent. The whole 
European world, which gave us our materials, has been 
moralized and liberalized by the striking and stupendous 
spectacle. 

No other modern nation has been schooled as we 
have been in big undertakings and the mastery of novel 
difficulties. We have become confirmed in energy, in 
resourcefulness, in practical proficiency, in self-confi- 
dence. We have become confirmed, also, so far as our 
character is concerned, in the habit of acting under an 
odd mixture of selfish and altruistic motives. Having 
ourselves a population fit to be free, making good its 
freedom in every sort of unhampered enterprise, deter- 
mining its own destiny unguided and unbidden, moving 
as it pleased within wide boundaries, using institutions, 
not dominated by them, we have sympathized with free- 
dom everywhere; have deemed it niggardly to deny 
an equal degree of freedom to any race or community 
that desired it; have pressed handsome principles of 
equity in international dealings; have rejoiced to believe 
that our principles might some day make every govern- 
ment a servant, not a master, of its people. Ease and 
prosperity have made us wish the whole world to be as 
happy and well to do as ourselves; and we have sup- 
posed that institutions and principles like our own were 
the simple prescription for making them so. And yet, 
when issues of our own interest arose, we have not been 
unselfish. We have shown ourselves kin to all the world, 
when it came to pushing an advantage. Our action 


COLLEGE AND STATE 405 


against Spain in the Floridas, and against Mexico on 
the coasts of the Pacific; our attitude toward first the 
Spaniards, and then the French, with regard to the 
control of the Mississippi; the unpitying force with 
which we thrust the Indians to the wall wherever they 
stood in our way, have suited our professions of peace- 
fulness and justice and liberality no better than the 
aggressions of other nations that were strong and not 
to be gainsaid. Even Mr. Jefferson, philanthropist and 
champion of peaceable and modest government though 
he was, exemplified this double temper of the people 
he ruled. “Peace is our passion,” he had declared; but 
the passion abated when he saw the mouth of the Missis- 
sippi about to pass into the hands of France. ‘Though 
he had loved France and hated England, he did not 
hesitate then what language to hold. ‘There is on the 
globe,” he wrote to Mr. Livingston at Paris, ‘‘one 
single spot the possessor of which is our natural and 
habitual enemy. The day that France takes possession 
of New Orleans seals the union of two nations, who, in 
conjunction, can maintain exclusive possession of the 
sea. From that moment we must marry ourselves to 
the British fleet and nation.’”’ Our interests must march 
forward, altruists though we are: other nations must see 
to it that they stand off, and do not seek to stay us. 

It is only just now, however, that we have awakened 
to our real relationship to the rest of mankind. Ab- 
sorbed in our own development, we had fallen into a 
singular ignorance of the rest of the world. The iso- 
lation in which we lived was quite without parallel in 
modern history. Our only near neighbor of any con- 
sequence was like ourselves in every essential particular. 
The life of Canada has been unlike ours only in matters 
which have turned out in the long run to be matters of 
detail; only because she has had direct political connec- 
tion with the mother country, and because she has had 
to work out the problem of forming a real union of 
life and sentiment between alien strains of French and 


406 COLLEGE AND STATE 


English blood in her population. The contrast grows 
less and less between the two sides of the friendly bor- 
der. And so we have looked upon nothing but our 
own ways of living, and have been formed in isolation. 
This has made us—not provincial, exactly: upon so big 
and various a continent there could not be the single 
pattern of thought and manners and purpose to be found 
cloistered in a secluded province. But if provincial be 
not the proper word, it suggests the actual fact. We 
have, like provincials, too habitually confined our view 
to the range of our own experiences. We have acquired 
a false self-confidence, a false self-sufficiency, because 
we have heeded no successes or failures but our own. 
There could be no better illustration of this than the 
constant reargument, de novo, of the money question 
among us, and the easy currency to be obtained, at every 
juncture of financial crisis, for the most childish errors 
with regard to the well-known laws of value and ex- 
change. No nation not isolated like ourselves in thought 
and experience could possibly think itself able to estab- 
lish a value of its own for gold and silver, by legislation 
which paid no regard either to the commercial opera- 
tions or to the laws of coinage and exchange which ob- 
tained outside its own borders. That a great political 
party should be able to win men of undoubted cultiva- 
tion and practical sense to the support of a platform 
which embodied palpable and thrice-proven errors in 
such matters, and that, too, at a great election following 
close upon protracted, earnest, frank, and universal dis- 
cussion, and should poll but little less than half the 
votes of the nation, is startling proof enough that we 
have learned to think, for the most part, only in terms 
of our own separate life and independent action, and 
have come to think ourselves a divided portion of man- 
kind, masters and makers of our own laws of trade. 
We have been equally deceived in matters in which 
we might more reasonably have deemed ourselves ac- 
credited experts. Misled by our own splendid initial 


—_- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 407 


advantage in the matter of self-government, we have 
suffered ourselves to misunderstand self-government it- 
self, when the question was whether it could be put 
into practice amidst conditions totally unlike those with 
which, and with which alone, we have been familiar. 
The people of the United States have never known 
anything but self-government since the colonies were 
founded. ‘They have forgotten the discipline which pre- 
ceded the founding of the colonies, the long drill in 
order and in obedience to law, the long subjection to 
kings and to parliaments which were not in fact of the 
people’s choosing. ‘They have forgotten how many 
generations were once in tutelage in order that the 
generations which discovered and settled the coasts of 
America might be mature and free. No thoughtful” 
student of history or observer of affairs needs to be told 
the necessary conditions precedent to self-government: 
the slow growth of the sense of law; the equally slow 
growth of the sense of community and of fellowship in 
every general interest; the habit of organization, the 
habit of discipline and obedience to those intrusted with 
authority, the self-restraint of give and take; the alle- 
giance to ideals, the consciousness of mutual obligation; 
the patience and intelligence which are content with a 
slow and universal growth. These things have all been 
present in abundant measure in our own national life; 
but we have not deemed them singular, and have as- 
sumed that they were within reach of all others as well, 
and at as little cost of conscious effort. 

Our own form of self-government is, in fact, by no 
means the one necessary and inevitable form. England 
is the oldest home of self-government in the modern 
world; our own principles and practices of self-govern- 
ment were derived from her; she has served as the model 
and inspiring example of self-government for every 
country in Europe throughout a century of democratic 
reform. And yet England did not have what we should 
call local self-government until 1888, outside her bor- 


408 COLLEGE AND STATE 


oughs. Until 1888, influential country gentlemen, 
appointed justices of the peace by the crown upon the 
nomination of the Lord Chancellor, were the govern- 
ing officers of her counties. Practically every important 
matter of local administration was in their hands, and 
yet the people of the counties had absolutely no voice 
in their selection. Things had stood so for more than 
four hundred years. Professor Rudolph Gneist, the 
great German student of English institutions, in ex- 
pounding English ideas of self-government as he found 
them exemplified in the actual organization of local ad- 
ministration, declared that the word government was 
quite as emphatic in the compound as the word self. 
The people of the counties were not self-directed in 
affairs: they were governed by crown officials. The 
policy of the crown was indeed moderated and guided in 
all things by the influence of a representative parlia- 
ment; the justices received no salaries; were men resi- 
dent in the counties for which they were commissioned, 
identified with them in life and interest, landlords and 
neighbors among the men whose public affairs they 
administered. They had nothing to gain by oppression, 
much to gain by the real advancement of prosperity 
and good feeling within their jurisdictions: they were 
in a very excellent and substantial sense representative 
men. But they were not elected representatives; their 
rule was not democratic either in form or in principle. 
Such was the local self-government of England during 
some of the most notable and honorable periods of her 
history. 

Our own, meanwhile, though conceived in the same 
atmosphere and spirit, had been set up upon a very 
different pattern, suitable to a different order of society. 
The appointment of officials was discredited amongst 
us; election everywhere took its place. We made no 
hierarchy of officials. ‘We made laws,—laws for the 
selectmen, laws for the sheriff, laws for the county 
commissioners, laws for the district attorney, laws 


COLLEGE AND STATE 409 


for each official from bailiff to governor, — and 
bade the courts see to their enforcement; but we 
did not subordinate one officer to another. No man 
was commanded from the capital, as if he were a ser- 
vant of officials rather than of the people. Authority 
was put into commission and distributed piecemeal; no- 
where gathered or organized into a single commanding 
force. Oversight and concentration were omitted from 
the system. Federal administration, it is true, we con- 
stituted upon a different principle,—the principle of 
appointment and of responsibility to the President; but 
we did not, when that new departure was made, expect 
the patronage of the President to be large, or look to 
see the body of federal officials play any very important 
or intimate part in our life as a people. ‘The rule was 
to be, as before, the dispersion of authority. We printed 
the SELF large and the government small in almost 
every administrative arrangement we made; and that is 
still our attitude and preference. 

We have found that even among ourselves such ar- 
rangements are not universally convenient or service- 
able. They give us untrained officials, and an expert 
civil service is almost unknown amongst us. They give 
us petty officials, petty men of no ambition, without hope 
or fitness for advancement. They give us so many elec- 
tive offices that even the most conscientious voters have 
neither the time nor the opportunity to inform them- 
selves with regard to every candidate on their ballots, 
and must vote for a great many men of whom they 
know nothing. ‘They give us, consequently, the local 
machine and the local boss; and where population 
crowds, interests compete, work moves strenuously and 
at haste, life is many-sided and without unity, and voters 
of every blood and environment and social derivation 
mix and stare at one another at the same voting places, 
government miscarries, is confused, irresponsible, unin- 
telligent, wasteful. Methods of electoral choice and ad- 
ministrative organization, which served us admirably 


410 COLLEGE AND STATE 


well while the nation was homogeneous and rural, serve 
us ofttimes ill enough now that the nation is hetero- 
geneous and crowded into cities. 

It is of the utmost importance that we should see the 
unmistakable truth of this matter and act upon it with 
all candor. It is not a question of the excellence of self- 
government: it is a question of the method of self-gov- 
ernment, and of choosing which word of the compound 
we shall emphasize in any given case. It is a matter of 
separating the essentials from the non-essentials, the 


principle of self-government from its accidental forms. 


Democracy is unquestionably the most wholesome and 
livable kind of government the world has yet tried: It 
supplies as no other system could the frank and univer- 
sal criticism, the free play of individual thought, the 
open conduct of public affairs, the spirit and pride of 
community and of codperation, which make govern- 


“-ments just and public-spirited. But the question of 


y 


efficiency is the same for it as for any other kind of 
polity; and if only it have the principle of representa- 
tion at the centre of its arrangements, where counsel is 
held and policy determined and law made, it can afford 
to put into its administrative organization any kind of 
businesslike power or official authority and any kind 
of discipline as if of a profession that it may think most 


likely to serve it. This we shall see, and this we shall do. 


It is the more imperative that we should see and do 
it promptly, because it is our present and immediate 
task to extend self-government to Porto Rico and the 
Philippines, if they be fit to receive it,—so soon as they 
can be made fit. If there is to be preparation, we must 
know of what kind it should be, and how it ought to be 
conducted. Although we have forgotten our own pre- 
paratory discipline in that kind, these new tasks will un- 
doubtedly teach us that some discipline—it may be pro- 
longed and tedious—must precede self-government and 
prepare the way for it; that one kind of self-government 
is suitable for one sort of community, one stage of de- 


COLLEGE AND STATE | 411 


velopment, another for another; that there is no univer- 
sal form or method either of preparation or of practice 
in the matter; that character and the moralizing effect 
of law are conditions precedent, obscure, and difficult, 
but absolutely indispensable. An examination of our own 
affairs will teach us these things; an examination of the 
affairs of the peoples we have undertaken to govern 
will confirm us in the understanding of them. 

We shall see now more clearly than ever before that 
we lack in our domestic arrangements, above all things 
else, concentration, both in political leadership and in 
administrative organization; for the lack will be pain- 
fully emphasized, and will embarrass us sadly in the 
career we have now set out upon. Authority has been 
as much dispersed and distributed in the making of law 
and the choice of policy, under the forms we have used 
hitherto, as it has been in administrative action. We 
have been governed in all things by mass meetings. 
Committees of Congress, as various in their make-up as 
the body itself, sometimes guided by the real leaders 
of party, oftener guided by men whom the country at 
large neither knew nor looked to for leadership, have 
determined our national policy, piece by piece, and the 
pieces have seldom been woven together into any single 
or consistent pattern of statesmanship. ‘There has been 
no leadership except the private leadership of party 
managers, no integration of the public business except 
such as was effected by the compromises and votes of 
party caucuses. Such methods will serve very awk- 
wardly, if at all, for action in international affairs or in 
the government of distant dependencies. In such mat-\ 
ters leadership must be single, open, responsible, and of 
the whole. Leadership and expert organization have 
become imperative, and our practical sense, never 
daunted hitherto, must be applied to the task of develop- 
ing them at once and with a will. | 

We did not of deliberate choice undertake these new 
tasks which shall transform us. All the world knows 


412 COLLEGE AND STATE 


the surprising circumstances which thrust them upon 
us. Sooner or later, nevertheless, they would have be- 
come inevitable. If they had not come upon us in this 
way, they would have come in another. They came 
upon us, at it was, though unexpected, with a strange 
opportuneness, as if part of a great preconceived plan 
for changing the world. Every man now knows that 
the world is to be changed,—changed according to an 
ordering of Providence hardly so much as foreshadowed 
until it came; except, it may be, to a few Europeans 
who were burrowing and plotting and dreaming in the 
mysterious East. The whole world had already become 
a single vicinage; each part had become neighbor to all 
the rest. No nation could live any longer to itself, the 
tasks and the duties of neighborhood being what they 
were. Whether we had had a material foothold there 
or not, it would have been the duty of the United States 
to play a part, and a leading part at that, in the opening 
and transformation of the East. We might not have 
seen our duty, had the Philippines not fallen to us by 
the willful fortune of war; but it would have been our 
duty, nevertheless, to play the part we now see our- 
selves obliged to play. The East is to be opened and 
transformed, whether we will or no; the standards of 
the West are to be imposed upon it; nations and peoples 
which have stood still the centuries through are to be 
quickened, and make part of the universal world of com- 
merce and of ideas which has so steadily been a-making 
by the advance of European power from age to age. 
“It is our peculiar duty, as it is also England’s, to mod- 
erate the process in the interests of liberty: to impart to 
the peoples thus driven out upon the road of change, 
so far as we have opportunity or can make it, our own 
principles of self-help; teach them order and self-control 
in the midst of change; impart to them, if it be possible 
by contact and sympathy and example, the drill and 
habit of law. and obedience which we long ago got out 
of the strenuous processes of English history; secure 


COLLEGE AND STATE 413 


for them, when we may, the free intercourse and the 
natural development which shall make them at least 
equal members of the family of nations. In China, of 
course, our part will be indirect, but in the Philippines 
it will be direct; and there in particular must the moral 
of our polity be set up and vindicated. | 
This we shall do, not by giving them out of hand our 

codes of political morality or our methods of political 
action, the generous gifts of complete individual liberty 
or the full-fangled institutions of American self-govern- 
ment,—a purple garment for their nakedness,—for these 
things are not blessings, but a curse, to undeveloped 
peoples, still in the childhood of their political growth; 
but by giving them, in the spirit of service, a govern- 
ment and rule which shall moralize them by being itself 
moral, elevate and steady them by being itself pure and 
steadfast, inducting them into the rudiments of justice 
and freedom. In other words, it is the aid of our char- 
acter they need, and not the premature aid of our insti- 
tutions. Our institutions must come after the ground of 
character and habit has been made ready for them; as 
effect, not cause, in the order of political growth. It is/~ 
thus that we shall ourselves recognize the fact, at last 
patent to all the world, that the service of democracy 
has been the development of ideals rather than the 
origination of practical methods of administration of 
universal validity, or any absolute qualification of the 
ultimate conceptions of sovereignty and the indispen- 
sable disciplinary operation of law. We must aid their’ 
character and elevate their ideals, and then see what 
these will bring forth, generating after their kind. As 
the panacea for oppressive taxation lies in honesty and 
economy rather than in this, that, or the other method 
of collection, in reasonable assessment rather than in a 
particular machinery of administration, so the remedy 
for oppressive government in general is, not a constitu- 
tion, but justice and enlightenment. One set of guaran- 


414 COLLEGE AND STATE 


tees will be effective under one set of circumstances, an- 
other under another. 

The best guarantee of good government we can give 
the Filipinos is, that we shall be sensitive to the opinion 
of the world; that we shall be sensitive in what we do 
to our own standards, so often boasted of and pro- 
claimed, and shall wish above all things else to live 
up to the character we have established, the standards 
we have professed. When they accept the compulsions 
of that character and accept those standards, they will 
be entitled to partnership with us, and shall have it. 
They shall, meanwhile, teach us, as we shall teach them. 
We shall teach them order as a condition precedent to 
liberty, self-control as a condition precedent to self- 
government; they shall teach us the true assessment 
of institutions,—that their only invaluable content is 
motive and character. We shall no doubt learn that 
“democracy and efficiency go together by no novel rule. 

Democracy is not so much a form of government as a 
- set of principles. Other forms of government may be 

“equally efficient; many forms of government are more 
efiicient,—know better ways of integrating and purify- 
ing administration than we have yet learned, more suc- 
cessful methods of imparting drill and order to restless 
and undeveloped peoples than we are likely to hit upon 
of ourselves, a more telling way of getting and a more 
effectual way of keeping leadership in a world of com- 
petitive policies, doubtful concerts, and international 
rivalries. We must learn what we can, and yet scrupu- 
lously square everything that we do with the high 
principles we brought into the world: that justice may 
be done to the lowly no less than to the great; that 
government may serve its people, not make itself their 
master,—may in its service heed both the wishes and 
the needs of those who obey it; that authority may be 
for leadership, not for aggrandizement; that the peo- 
ple may be the state. 


COLLEGE AND STATE AIS 


The reactions which such experiments in the univer- 
sal validity of principle and method are likely to bring _ 


about in respect of our own domestic institutions can: Wil 


not be calculated or forecast. Old principles applied~ 
in a new field may show old applications to have been 
clumsy and ill considered. We may ourselves get re- 
sponsible leadership instead of government by mass 
meeting; a trained and thoroughly organized adminis- 
trative service instead of administration by men pri- 
vately nominated and blindly elected; a new notion of 
terms of office and of standards of policy. If we but 
keep our ideals clear, our principles steadfast, we see 
not fear the change. : 


THE IDEALS OF AMERICA? 


FROM THE “ATLANTIC MONTHLY,” DECEMBER, 1902, 
VOL. XC, PP. 721-734. THIS ARTICLE APPEARED 
THE FIRST YEAR MR. WILSON WAS PRESIDENT OF 
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY. 


W* do not think or speak of the War for Inde- 
pendence as if we were aged men who, amidst 
alien scenes of change, comfort themselves with talk 
of great things done in days long gone by, the like of 
which they may never hope to see again. The spirit 
of the old days is not dead. If it were, who amongst 
us would care for its memory and distant, ghostly voice? 
It is the distinguishing mark, nay the very principle of 
life in a nation alive and quick in every fibre, as ours 
is, that all its days are great days,—are to its thought 
single and of a piece. Its past it feels to have been but 
the prelude and earnest of its present. It is from its 
memories of days old and new that it gets its sense of 
identity, takes its spirit of action, assures itself of its 
power and its capacity, and knows its place in the world. 
Old colony days, and those sudden days of revolution 
when debate turned to action and heady winds as if of 
destiny blew with mighty breath the long continent 
through, were our own days, the days of our childhood 
and our headstrong youth. We have not forgotten. 
Our memories make no effort to recall the time. The 
battle of Trenton is as real to us as the battle of San 
Juan hill. 

We remember the chill, and the ardor, too, of that 
gray morning when we came upon the startled outposts 

*An address delivered on the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniver- 
sary of the battle of Trenton, December 26, 1901. 

416 


COLLEGE AND STATE 417 


of the town, the driving sleet beating at our backs; the 
cries and hurrying of men in the street, the confused 
muster at our front, the sweeping fire of our guns and 
the rush of our men, Sullivan coming up by the road 
from the river. Washington at the north, where the 
road to Princeton is; the showy Hessian colonel shot 
from his horse amidst his bewildered men; the sur- 
render; the unceasing storm. And then the anxious 
days that followed: the recrossing of the icy river 
before even we had rested; the troop of surly prisoners 
to be cared for and sent forward to Philadelphia; the 
enemy all the while to be thought of, and the way to use 
our advantage. 

How much it meant a third time to cross the river, 
and wait here in the town for the regiments Sir William 
Howe should send against us! How sharp and clear 
the night was when we gave Cornwallis the slip and 
took the silent, frosty road to Allentown and Prince- 
ton! Those eighteen miles between bedtime and morn- 
ing are not easily forgot, nor that sharp brush with the 
redcoats at Princeton: the moving fight upon the slop- 
ing hillside, the cannon planted in the streets, the gray 
old building where the last rally was made,—and then 
the road to Brunswick, Cornwallis at our heels! 

How the face of things was changed in those brief 
days! There had been despair till then. It was but a 
few short weeks since the men of the Jersey towns and 
farms had seen us driven south across the river like 
fugitives; now we came back an army again, the Hes- 
sians who had but the other day harried and despoiled 
that countryside beaten and scattered before us, and 
they knew not whether to believe their eyes or not. 
As we pushed forward to the heights at Morristown we 
drew in the British lines behind us, and New Jersey 
was free of the redcoats again. The Revolution had 
had its turning point. It was easy then to believe that 
General Washington could hold his own against any 


418 COLLEGE AND STATE 


adversary in that terrible game of war. A new heart 
was in everything! 

And yet what differences of opinion there were, and 
how hot and emphatic every turn of the war made them 
among men who really spoke their minds and dissembled 
nothing! It was but six months since the Congress had 
ventured its Declaration of Independence, and the brave 
words of that defiance halted on many lips that read 
them. ‘There were men enough and to spare who would 
not speak them at all; who deemed the whole thing 
madness and deep folly, and even black treason. Men 
whose names all the colonies knew held off and would 
take no part in armed resistance to the ancient crown 
whose immemorial sovereignty kept a great empire to- 
gether. Men of substance at the ports of trade were 
almost all against the Revolution; and where men of 
means and principle led, base men who played for their 
own interest were sure to follow. Every movement 
of the patriotic leaders was spied upon and betrayed; 
everywhere the army moved there were men of the 
very countryside it occupied to be kept close watch 
against. 

Those were indeed ‘times that tried men’s souls’’! 
It was no light matter to put the feeling as of a nation 
into those scattered settlements: to bring the high- 
spirited planters of the Carolinas, who thought for 
themselves, or their humble neighbors on the upland 
farms, who ordered their lives as they pleased, to the 
same principles and point of view that the leaders of Vir- 
ginia and Massachusetts professed and occupied,—the 
point of view from which everything wore so obvious 
an aspect of hopeful revolt, where men planned the war 
at the north. There were great families at Philadelphia 
and in Boston itself who were as hard to win, and plain 
men without number in New York and the Jerseys who 
would not come for the beckoning. Opinion was always 
making and to be made, and the campaign of mind was 
as hard as that of arms. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 419 


To think of those days of doubt and stress, of the 
swaying of opinion this way and that, of counsels dis- 
tracted and plans to be made anew at every turn of 
the arduous business, takes one’s thoughts forward to 
those other days, as full of doubt, when the war had at 
last been fought out and a government was to be made. 
No doubt that crisis was the greatest of all. Opinion 
will form for a war, in the face of manifest provocation 
and of precious rights called in question. But the mak- 
ing of a government is another matter. And the goy- 
ernment to be made then was to take the place of the 
government cast off: there was the rub. It was difficult 
to want any common government at all after fighting 
to be quit of restraint and overlordship altogether; and 
it went infinitely hard to be obliged to make it strong, 
with a right to command and a power to rule. Then it 
was that we knew that even the long war, with its bitter 
training of the thoughts and its hard discipline of union, 
had not made a nation, but only freed a group of col- 
onies. The debt is the more incalculable which we owe 
to the little band of sagacious men who labored the sum- 
mer through, in that far year 1787, to give us a Consti- 
tution that those heady little commonwealths could be 
persuaded to accept, and which should yet be a frame- 
work within which the real powers of a nation might 
grow in the fullness of time, and gather head with the 
growth of a mighty people. 

They gave us but the outline, the formula, the broad 
and general programme of our life, and left us to fill 
it in with such rich store of achievement and sober ex- 
perience as we should be able to gather in the days to 
come. Not battles or any stirring scene of days of 
action, but the slow processes by which we grew and 
made our thought and formed our purpose in quiet days 
of peace, are what we find it hard to make real to our 
minds again, now that we are mature and have fared 
far upon the road. Our life is so broad and various 
now, and was so simple then; the thoughts of those first 


420 COLLEGE AND STATE 


days seem crude to us now and unreal. We smile upon 
the simple dreams of our youth a bit incredulously, and 
seem cut off from them by a great space. And yet it 
was by those dreams we were formed. ‘The lineage of 
our thoughts is unbroken. The nation that was mak- 
ing then was the nation which yesterday intervened in 
the affairs of Cuba, and to-day troubles the trade and 
the diplomacy of the world. 

It was clear to us even then, in those first days when 
we were at the outset of our life, with what spirit and 
mission we had come into the world. Clear-sighted men 
Oversea saw it too, whose eyes were not holden by pas- 
sion or dimmed by looking steadfastly only upon things 
near at hand. We shall not forget those deathless 
passages of great speech, compact of music and high 
sense, in which Edmund Burke justified us and gave us 
out of his riches our philosophy of right action in affairs 
of state. Chatham rejoiced that we had resisted. Fox 
clapped his hands when he heard that Cornwallis had 
been trapped and taken at Yorktown. Dull men with- 
out vision, small men who stood upon no place of eleva- 
tion in their thoughts, once cried treason against these 
men,—though no man dared speak such a taunt to the 
passionate Chatham’s face; but now all men speak as 
Fox spoke, and our Washington is become one of the 
heroes of the English race. What did it mean that the 
greatest Englishmen should thus cheer us to revolt at 
the very moment of our rebellion? What is it that has 
brought us at last the verdict of the world? 

It means that in our stroke for independence we struck 
a blow for all the world. Some men saw it then; all 
men see it now. ‘The very generation of Englishmen 
who stood against us in that day of our struggling birth 
lived to see the liberating light of that day shine about 
their own path before they made an end and were gone. 
They had deep reason before their own day was out 
to know what it was that Burke had meant when he said, 
“We cannot falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, 


COLLEGE AND STATE 421 


and persuade them that they are not sprung from a na- 
tion in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. 
The language in which they would hear you tell them 
this tale would detect the imposition, your speech would 
betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest person on 
earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.” .. . 
“For, in order to prove that the Americans have no 
right to their liberties, we are every day endeavoring 
to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit 
of our own. To prove that the Americans ought not to 
be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of free- 
dom itself; and we never seem to gain a paltry advan- 
tage over them in debate, without attacking some of 
those principles, or deriding some of those feelings, for 
which our ancestors have shed their blood.” 

It turned out that the long struggle in America had 
been the first act in the drama whose end and culmina- 
tion should be the final establishment of constitutional 
government for England and for English communities 
everywhere. It is easy now, at this quiet distance, for 
the closeted student to be puzzled how to set up the 
legal case of the colonists against the authority of Par- 
liament. It is possible now to respect the scruples of 
the better loyalists, and even to give all honor to the 
sober ardor of self-sacrifice with which they stood four- 
square against the Revolution. We no longer challenge 
their right. Neither do we search out the motives of 
the mass of common men who acted upon the one side 
or the other. Like men in all ages and at every crisis 
of affairs, they acted each according to his sentiment, 
his fear, his interest, or his lust. We ask, rather, why 
did the noble gentlemen to whom it fell to lead America 
seek great action and embark all their honor in such a 
cause? What was it they fought for? 

A lawyer is puzzled to frame the answer; but no 
statesman need be. “If I were sure,” said Burke, ‘‘that 
the colonists had, at their leaving this country, sealed 
a regular compact of servitude, that they had solemnly 


422 COLLEGE AND STATE 


abjured all the rights of citizens, that they had made a 
vow to renounce all ideas of liberty for them and their 
posterity to all generations, yet I should hold myself 
obliged to conform to the temper I found universally 
prevalent in my own day, and to govern two millions of 
men, impatient of servitude, on the principles of free- 
dom. I am not determining a point of law; . . . the 
general character and situation of a people must deter- 
mine what sort of government is fit for them.” It was 
no abstract point of governmental theory the leaders 
of the colonies took the field to expound. Washington, 
Henry, Adams, Hancock, Franklin, Morris, Boudinot, 
Livingston, Rutledge, Pinckney,—these were men of 
affairs, who thought less of books than of principles of 
action. They fought for the plain right of self-govern- 
ment, which any man could understand. The govern- 
ment oversea had broken faith with them,—not the 
faith of law, but the faith that is in precedents and an- 
cient understandings, though they be tacit and nowhere 
spoken in any charter. Hitherto the colonies had been 
let live their own lives according to their own genius, 
and vote their own supplies to the crown as if their 
assemblies were so many parliaments. Now, of a 
sudden, the Parliament in England was to thrust their 
assemblies aside and itself lay their taxes. Here was 
too new a thing. Government without precedent was 
government without license or limit. It was govern- 
ment by innovation, not government by agreement. Old 
ways were the only ways acceptable to English feet. 
/ The revolutionists stood for no revolution at all, but for 
the maintenance of accepted practices, for the invio- 
lable understandings of precedent,—in brief, for consti- 
tutional government. 

That sinister change which filled the air of America 
with storm darkened the skies of England too. Not in 
America only did George, the king, and his counsellors 
make light of and willfully set aside the ancient under- 
standings which were the very stuff of liberty in English 


COLLEGE AND STATE 423 


eyes. That unrepresentative Parliament, full of place- 
men, which had taxed America, contained majorities 
which the king could bestow at his will upon this minis- 
ter or that; and the men who set America by the ears 
came or went from their places at his bidding. It was 
he, not the Parliament, that made and unmade minis- 
tries. Behind the nominal ministers of the crown stood 
men whom Parliament did not deal with, and the nation 
did not see who were the king’s favorites, and therefore 
the actual rulers of England. There was here the real 
revolution. America, with her sensitive make-up, her 
assemblies that were the real representatives of her peo- 
ple, had but felt sooner than the mass of Englishmen at 
home the unhappy change of air which seemed about to 
corrupt the constitution itself. Burke felt it in Eng- 
land, and Fox, and every man whose thoughts teoked 
soberly forth upon the signs of the times. And pres- 
ently, when the American war was over, the nation itself 
began to see what light the notable thing done in Am- 
erica shed upon its own affairs. The king was to be 
grappled with at home, the Parliament was to be freed 
from his power, and the ministers who ruled England 
were to be made the real servants of the people. Con- 
stitutional government was to be made a reality again. 
We had begun the work of freeing England when we 
completed the work of freeing ourselves. 

The great contest which followed oversea, and which 
was nothing less than the capital and last process of 
making and confirming the constitution of England, kept 
covert beneath the surface of affairs while the wars of 
the French Revolution swept the world. Not until 
1832 was representation in Parliament at last reformed, 
and the Commons made a veritable instrument of the 
nation’s will. Days of revolution, when ancient king- 
doms seemed tottering to their fall, were no days in 
which to be tinkering the constitution of old England. 
Her statesmen grew slow and circumspect and moved 
in all things with infinite prudence, and even with a 


424 COLLEGE AND STATE 


novel timidity. But when the times fell quiet again, 
opinion gathering head for a generation, moved for- 
ward at last to its object; and government was once 
more by consent in England. ‘The Parliament spoke 
the real mind of the nation, and the leaders whom the 
Commons approved were of necessity also the ministers 
of the crown. Men could then look back and see that 
America had given England the shock, and the crown 
the opportune defeat, which had awakened her to save 
her constitution from corruption. 

Meanwhile, what of America herself? How had 
she used the independence she had demanded and won? 
For a little while she had found it a grievous thing to 
be free, with no common power set over her to hold her 
to a settled course of life which should give her energy 
and bring her peace and honor and increase of wealth. 
Even when the convention at Philadelphia had given her 
the admirable framework of a definite constitution, she 
found it infinitely hard to hit upon a common way of 
progress under a mere printed law which had no sanc- 
tion of custom or affection, which no ease of old habit 
sustained, and no familiar light of old tradition made 
plain to follow. This new law had yet to be filled with 
its meanings, had yet to be given its texture of life. Our 
whole history, from that day of our youth to this day 
of our glad maturity, has been filled with the process. 

It took the War of 1812 to give us spirit and full con- 
sciousness and pride of station as a nation. That was 
the real war of independence for our political parties. 
It was then we cut our parties and our passions loose 
from politics oversea, and set ourselves to make a career 
which should be indeed our own. That accomplished, 
and our weak youth turned to callow manhood, we 
stretched our hand forth again to the west, set forth 
with a new zest and energy upon the western rivers and 
the rough trails that led across the mountains and down 
to the waters of the Mississippi. ‘There lay a continent 
to be possessed. In the very day of first union Virginia 


COLLEGE AND STATE 425 


and her sister states had ceded to the common govern- 
ment all the great stretches of western land that lay 
between the mountains and that mighty river into which 
all the western waters gathered head. While we were 
yet weak and struggling for our place among the nations, 
Mr. Jefferson had added the vast bulk of Louisiana, 
beyond the river, whose boundaries no man certainly 
knew. All the great spaces of the continent from 
Canada round and about by the great Rockies to the 
warm waters of the southern Gulf lay open to the feet 
of our young men. The forests rang with their noisy 
march. What seemed a new race deployed into those 
broad valleys and out upon those long, unending plains 
which were the common domain, where no man knew 
any government but the government of the whole people. 
That was to be the real making of the nation. 

There sprang up the lusty states which now, in these 
days of our full stature, outnumber almost threefold the 
thirteen commonwealths which formed the Union. 
Their growth set the pace of our life; forced the slavery 
question to a final issue; gave us the civil war with its 
stupendous upheaval and its resettlement of the very 
foundations of the government; spread our strength 
from sea to sea; created us a free and mighty people, 
whose destinies daunt the imagination of the Old World 
looking on. That increase, that endless accretion, that 
rolling, resistless tide, incalculable in its strength, in- 
finite in its variety, has made us what we are; has put 
the resources of a huge continent at our disposal; has 
provoked us to invention and given us mighty captains 
of industry. This great pressure of a people moving 
always to new frontiers, in search of new lands, new 
power, the full freedom of a virgin world, has ruled 
our course and formed our policies like a Fate. It gave 
us, not Louisiana alone, but Florida also. It forced war 
with Mexico upon us, and gave us the coasts of the 
Pacific. It swept Texas into the Union. It made far 


426 COLLEGE AND STATE 
Alaska a territory of the United States. Who shall 


say where it will end? 

The census takers of 1890 informed us, when their 
task was done, that they could no longer find any frontier 
upon this continent; that they must draw their maps as if 
the mighty process of settlement that had gone on, cease- 
less, dramatic, the century through, were now ended and 
complete, the nation made from sea to sea. We had not 
pondered their report a single decade before we made 
new frontiers for ourselves beyond the seas, accounting 
the seven thousand miles of ocean that lie between us 
and the Philippine Islands no more than the three thou- 
sand which once lay between us and the coasts of the 
Pacific. No doubt there is here a great revolution in 
our lives. No war ever transformed us quite as the war 
with Spain transformed us. No previous years ever ran 
with so swift a change as the years since 1898. We have 
witnessed a new revolution. We have seen the trans- 
formation of America completed. ‘That little group of 
states, which one hundred and twenty-five years ago cast 
the sovereignty of Britain off, is now grown into a mighty 
power. That little confederation has now massed and 
organized its energies. A confederacy is transformed 
into a nation. The battle of Trenton was not more sig- 
nificant than the battle of Manila. The nation that was 
one hundred and twenty-five years in the making has now 
stepped forth into the open arena of the world. 

I ask you to stand with me at this new turning-point of 
our life, that we may look before and after, and judge 
ourselves alike in the light of that old battle fought here 
in these streets, and in the light of all the mighty proc- 
esses of our history that have followed. We cannot too 
often give ourselves such challenge of self-examination. 
It will hearten, it will steady, it will moralize us to 
reassess our hopes, restate our ideals, and make manifest 
to ourselves again the principles and the purposes upon 
which we act. We are else without chart upon a novel 
voyage. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 427 


What are our thoughts now, as we look back from this 
altered age to the Revolution which to-day we celebrate? 
How do we think of its principles and of its example? 
Do they seem remote and of a time not our own, or 
do they still seem stuff of our thinking, principles near 
and intimate, and woven into the very texture of our 
institutions? What say we now of liberty and of self- 
government, its embodiment? What lessons have we 
read of it on our journey hither to this high point of out- 
look at the beginning of a new century? Do those old 
conceptions seem to us now an ideal modified, of altered 
face, and of a mien not shown in the simple days when 
the government was formed? 

Of course forms have changed. The form of the 
Union itself is altered, to the model that was in Hamil- 
ton’s thought rather than to that which Jefferson once 
held before us, adorned, transfigured, in words that led 
the mind captive. Our ways of life are profoundly 
changed since that dawn. ‘The balance of the states 
against the federal government, however it may strike 
us now as of capital convenience in the distribution of 
powers and the quick and various exercise of the energies 
of the people, no longer seems central to our conceptions 
of governmental structure, no longer seems of the 
essence of the people’s liberty. We are no longer stren- 
uous about the niceties of constitutional law; no longer 
dream that a written law shall save us, or that by cere- 
monial cleanliness we may lift our lives above corruption. 
But has the substance of things changed with us, also? 
Wherein now do we deem the life and very vital principle 
of self-government to lie? Where is that point of prin- 
ciple at which we should wish to make our stand and take 
again the final risk of revolution? What other crisis 
do we dream of that might bring in its train another 
battle of Trenton? 

These are intensely practical questions. We fought 
but the other day to give Cuba self-government. It isa 
point of conscience with us that the Philippines shall 


428 COLLEGE AND STATE 


have it, too, when our work there is done and they are 
ready. But when will our work there be done, and 
how shall we know when they are ready? How, when 
our hand is withdrawn from her capitals and she plays 
her game of destiny apart and for herself, shall we be 
sure that Cuba has this blessing of liberty and self-gov- 
ernment, for which battles are justly fought and revolu- 
tions righteously set afoot? If we be apostles of liberty 
and of self-government, surely we know what they are, 
in their essence and without disguise of form, and shall 
not be deceived in the principles of their application by 
mere differences between this race and that. We have 
given pledges to the world and must redeem them as we 
can. 

Some nice tests of theory are before us,—are even now 
at hand. There are those amongst us who have spoken 
of the Filipinos as standing where we stood when we 
were in the throes of that great war which was turned 
from fear to hope again in that battle here in the streets 
of Trenton which we are met to speak. of, and who 
have called Aguinaldo, the winning, subtle youth now 
a prisoner in our hands at Manila, a second Washington. 
Have they, then, forgotten that tragic contrast upon 
which the world gazed in the days when our Washing- 
ton was President: on the one side of the sea, in 
America, peace, an ordered government, a people busy 
with the tasks of mart and home, a group of common- 
wealths bound together by strong cords of their own 
weaving, institutions sealed and confirmed by debate 
and the suffrages of free men, but not by the pouring 
out of blood in civil strife,—on the other, in France, a 
nation frenzied, distempered, seeking it knew not what, 
—a nation which poured its best blood out in a vain 
sacrifice, which cried of liberty and self-government 
until the heavens rang and yet ran straight and swift 
to anarchy, to give itself at last, with an almost glad 
relief, to the masterful tyranny of a soldier? ‘I should 
suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of 


COLLEGE AND STATE 429 


France,’”’ said Burke, the master who had known our 
liberty for what it was, and knew this set up in France 
to be spurious,—*‘I should suspend my congratulations 
on the new liberty of France until I was informed how 
it had been combined with government; with public 
force; with the discipline and obedience of armies; with 
the collection of an effective and well-distributed rev- 
enue; with morality and religion; with the solidity of 
property; with peace and order; with social and civil 
manners.” Has it not taken France a century to effect 
the combination; and are all men sure that she has 
found it even now? And yet were not these things 
combined with liberty amongst us from the very first? 
How interesting a light shines upon the matter of our 
thought out of that sentence of Burke’s! How liberty 
had been combined with government! Is there here a 
difficulty, then? Are the two things not kindly disposed 
toward one another? Does it require any nice art and 
adjustment to unite and reconcile them? Is there here 
some cardinal test which those amiable persons have 
overlooked, who have dared to cheer the Filipino rebels 
on in their stubborn resistance to the very government 
they themselves live under and owe fealty to? Think of 
Washington’s passion for order, for authority, for some 
righteous public force which should teach individuals 
their place under government, for the solidity of prop- 
erty, for morality and sober counsel. It was plain that 
he cared not a whit for liberty without these things to 
sustain and give it dignity. ‘You talk, my good sir,” 
he exclaimed, writing to Henry Lee in Congress, “you 
talk of employing influence to appease the present tu- 
mults in Massachusetts. I know not where that influ- 
ence is to be found, or, if attainable, that it would 
be a proper remedy for the disorders. Influence is no 
government. Let us have one by which our lives, liber- 
ties, and properties will be secured, or let us know the 
worst at once.” In brief, the fact is this, that liberty is 
the privilege of maturity, of self-control, of self-mastery 


430 COLLEGE AND STATE 


and a thoughtful care for righteous dealings,—that 
some peoples may have it, therefore, and others may 
not. 

We look back to the great men who made our gov- 
ernment as to a generation, not of revolutionists, but 
of statesmen. They fought, not to pull down, but to pre- 
serve,—not for some fair and far-off thing they wished 
for, but for a familiar thing they had and meant to 
keep. Ask any candid student of the history of Eng- 
lish liberty, and he will tell you that these men were 
of the lineage of Pym and Hampden, of Pitt and Fox; 
that they were men who consecrated their lives to the 
preservation intact of what had been wrought out in 
blood and sweat by the countless generations of sturdy 
freemen who had gone before them. 

Look for a moment at what self-government really 
meant in their time. ‘Take English history for your 
test. I know not where else you may find an answer 
to the question. We speak, all the world speaks, of 
England as the mother of liberty and self-government; 
and the beginning of her liberty we place in the great 
year that saw Magna Charta signed, that immortal 
document whose phrases ring again in all our own Bills 
of Rights. Her liberty is in fact older than that signal 
year; but 1215 we set up as a shining mark to hold 
the eye. And yet we know, for all we boast the date 
so early, for how many a long generation after that 
the monarch ruled and the Commons cringed; haughty 
Plantagenets had their way, and indomitable Tudors 
played the master to all men’s fear, till the fated Stuarts 
went their stupid way to exile and the scaffold. Kings 
were none the less kings because their subjects were free 
men. 

Local self-government in England consisted until 
1888 of government by almost omnipotent Justices of 
the Peace appointed by the Lord Chancellor. They 
were laymen, however. They were country gentlemen 
and served without pay. They were of the neighbor- 


COLLEGE AND STATE | 431 


hood and used their power for its benefit as their lights 
served them; but no man had a vote or choice as to 
which of the country gentlemen of his county should 
be set over him; and the power of the Justices sitting 
in Quarter Sessions covered almost every point of jus- 
tice and administration not directly undertaken by the 
officers of the crown itself. ‘Long ago,” laughs an Eng- 
lish writer, “lawyers abandoned the hope of describing 
the duties of a Justice in any methodic fashion, and the 
alphabet has become the only possible connecting thread. 
A Justice must have something to do with ‘Railroads, 
Rape, Rates, Recognizances, Records, and Recreation 
Grounds’; with ‘Perjury, Petroleum, Piracy, and Play- 
houses’; with ‘Disorderly Houses, Dissenters, Dogs, 
and Drainage.’’’ And yet Englishmen themselves called 
their life under these lay masters self-government. 

The English House of Commons was for many a gen- 
eration, many a century even, no House of the Commons 
at all, but a house full of country gentlemen and rich 
burghers, the aristocracy of the English counties and 
the English towns; and yet it was from this House, 
and not from that reformed since 1832, that the world 
drew, through Montesquieu, its models of representative 
self-government in the days when our own Union was 
set up. 

In America, and in America alone, did self-govern- 
ment mean an organization self-originated, and of the 
stuff of the people themselves. America had gone a step 
beyond her mother country. Her people were for the 
most part picked men: such men as have the energy 
and the initiative to leave old homes and old friends, 
and go to far frontiers to make a new life for them- 
selves. They were men of a certain initiative, to take 
the world into their own hands. The king had given 
them their charters, but within the broad definitions of 
those charters they had built as they pleased, and com- 
mon men were partners in the government of their lit- 
tle commonwealths. At home, in the old country, there 


432 COLLEGE AND STATE 


was need, no doubt, that the hand of the king’s gov- 
ernment should keep men within its reach. The coun- 
trysides were full of yokels who would have been brutes 
to deal with else. The counties were in fact represented 
very well by the country gentlemen who ruled them: for 
they were full of broad estates where men were tenants, 
not freehold farmers, and the interests of masters were 
generally enough the interests of their men. The towns 
had charters of their own. There was here no demo- 
cratic community, and no one said or thought that the 
only self-government was democratic self-government. 
In America the whole constitution of society was demo- 
cratic, inevitably and of course. Men lay close to their 
simple governments, and the new life brought to a new 
expression the immemorial English principle, that the 
intimate affairs of local administration and the common 
interests that were to be served in the making of laws 
should be committed to laymen, who would look at the 
government critically and from without, and not to the 
king’s agents, who would look at it professionally and 
from within. England had had self-government time 
out of mind; but in America English self-government 
had become popular self-government. 

‘‘Almost all the civilized states derive their national 
unity,” says a great English writer of our generation, 
“from common subjection, past or present, to royal 
power; the Americans of the United States, for exam- 
ple, are a nation because they once obeyed a king.” 
That example in such a passage comes upon us with a 
shock: it is very unexpected,—‘‘the Americans of the 
United States, for example, are a nation because they 
once obeyed a king!” And yet, upon reflection, can we 
deny the example? It is plain enough that the reason 
why the English in America got self-government and 
knew how to use it, and the French in America did not, 
was, that the English had had a training under the 
kings of England and the French under the kings of 
France. In the one country men did all things at 


COLLEGE AND STATE 433 


the bidding of officers of the crown; in the other, offi- 
cers of the crown listened, were constrained to listen, 
to the counsels of laymen drawn out of the general body 
of the nation. And yet the kings of England were no 
less kings than the kings of France. Obedience is every- 
where the basis of government, and the English were 
not ready either in their life or in their thought for a 
free régime under which they should choose their kings 
by ballot. For that régime they could be made ready 
only by the long drill which should make them respect 
above all things the law and the authority of governors. 
Discipline—discipline generations deep—had first to 
give them an ineradicable love of order, the poise of 
men self-commanded, the spirit of men who obey and 
yet speak their minds and are free, before they could 
be Americans. 

No doubt a king did hold us together until we learned 
how to hold together of ourselves. No doubt our unity 
as a nation does come from the fact that we once obeyed 
a king. No one can look at the processes of English 
history and doubt that the throne has been its centre of 
poise, though not in our days its centre of force. Steadied 
by the throne, the effective part of the nation has, at 
every stage of its development, dealt with and controlled 
the government in the name of the whole. The king 
and his subjects have been partners in the great under- 
taking. At last, in our country, in this best trained 
portion of the nation, set off by itself, the whole became 
fit to act for itself, by veritable popular representation, 
without the make-weight of a throne. That is the his- 
tory of our liberty. You have the spirit of English 
history, and of English royalty, from King Harry’s 
mouth upon the field of Agincourt :— 


“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; 
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me 
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, 
This day shall gentle his condition: 


A, 


434 COLLEGE AND STATE 


And gentlemen in England now a-bed 

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, 
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks 
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.” 


It is thus the spirit of English life has made comrades 
of us all to be a nation. 
This is what Burke meant by combining government 


‘with liberty,—the spirit of obedience with the spirit 


of free action. Liberty is not itself government. In 
the wrong hands,—in hands unpracticed, undisci- 
plined,—it is incompatible with government. Discipline 
must precede it,—if necessary, the discipline of being 
under masters. Then will self-control make it a thing 
of life and not a thing of tumult, a tonic, not an insur- 
gent madness in the blood. Shall we doubt, then, what 
the conditions precedent to liberty and self-government 
are, and what their invariable support and accompani- 
ment must be, in the countries whose administration we 
have taken over in trust, and particularly in those far 
Philippine Islands whose government is our chief anxi- 
ety? We cannot give them any quittance of the debt 
ourselves have paid. ‘They can have liberty no cheaper 
than we got it. They must first take the discipline 
of law, must first love order and instinctively yield to 
it. It is the heathen, not the free citizen of a self-gov- 
erned country, who “in his blindness bows down to 
wood and stone, and don’t obey no orders unless they 
is his own.’ We are old in this learning and must be 
their tutors. 

But we may set them upon the way with an advan- 
tage we did not have until our hard journey was more 
than half made. We can see to it that the law which 
teaches them obedience is just law and even-handed. We 
can see to it that justice be free and unpurchasable 
among them. We can make order lovely by making it 
the friend of every man and not merely the shield of 
some. We can teach them by our fairness in adminis- 
tration that there may be a power in government which, 


COLLEGE AND STATE 435 


though imperative and irresistible by those who would 
cross or thwart it, does not act for its own aggrandize- 
ment, but is the guarantee that all shall fare alike. That 
will infinitely shorten their painful tutelage. Our pride, 
our conscience will not suffer us to give them less. 

And, if we are indeed bent upon service and not mas- 
tery, we shall give them more. We shall take them into 
our confidence and suffer them to teach us, as our critics. 
No man can deem himself free from whom the govern- 
ment hides its action, or who is forbidden to speak his 
mind about affairs, as if government were a private 
thing which concerned the governors alone. Whatever 
the power of government, if it is just, there may be 
publicity of governmental action and freedom of opin- 
ion; and public opinion gathers head effectively only by 
concerted public agitation. These are the things— 
knowledge of what the government is doing and liberty 
to speak of it—that have made Englishmen feel like 
free men, whether they liked their governors or not: 
the right to know and the right to speak out,—to speak 
out in plain words and in open counsel. Privacy, official 
reticence, governors hedged about and inaccessible,— 
these are the marks of arbitrary government, under 
which spirited men grow restive and resentful. ‘The 
mere right to criticise and to have matters explained 
to them cools men’s tempers and gives them understand- 
ing in affairs. This is what we seek among our new sub- 
jects: that they shall understand us, and after free con- 
ference shall trust us: that they shall perceive that we 
are not afraid of criticism, and that we are ready to ex- 
plain and to take suggestions from all who are ready, 
when the conference is over, to obey. 

There will be a wrong done, not if we govern and 
govern as we will, govern with a strong hand that will 
brook no resistance, and according to principles of right 
gathered from our own experience, not from theirs, 
which has never yet touched the vital matter we are con- 
cerned with; but only if we govern in the spirit of auto- 


436 COLLEGE AND STATE 


crats and of those who serve themselves, not their sub- 
jects. The whole solution lies less in our methods than 
in our temper. We must govern as those who learn; 
and they must obey as those who are in tutelage. They 
are children and we are men in these deep matters of 
government and justice. If we have not learned the 
substance of these things no nation is ever likely to 
learn it, for it is taken from life, and not from books. 
But though children must be foolish, impulsive, head- 
strong, unreasonable, men may be arbitrary, self-opin- 
ionated, impervious, impossible, as the English were 
in their Oriental colonies until they learned. We should 
be inexcusable to repeat their blunders and wait as long 
as they waited to learn how to serve the peoples whom 
we govern. It is plain we shall have a great deal to 
learn; it is to be hoped we shall learn it fast. 

There are, unhappily, some indications that we have 
ourselves yet to learn the things we would teach. You 
have but to think of the large number of persons of 
your own kith and acquaintance who have for the past 
two years been demanding, in print and out of it, with 
moderation and the air of reason and without it, that 
we give the Philippines independence and self-govern- 
ment now, at once, out of hand. It were easy enough 
to give them independence, if by independence you 
mean only disconnection with any government outside 
the islands, the independence of a rudderless boat adrift. 
‘But self-government? How is that ‘‘given’’? Can it be 
given? Is it not gained, earned, graduated into from 
the hard school of life? We have reason to think so. 
I have just now been trying to give the reasons we have 
for thinking so. 

There are many things, things slow and difficult to 
come at, which we have found to be conditions prece- 
dent to liberty,—to the liberty which can be combined 
with government; and we cannot, in our present situ- 
ation, too often remind ourselves of these things, in 
order that we may look steadily and wisely upon lib- 


COLLEGE AND STATE ee 


erty, not in the uncertain light of theory, but in the 
broad, sunlike, disillusioning light of experience. We 
know, for one thing, that it rests at bottom upon a 
clear experimental knowledge of what are in fact the 
just rights of individuals, of what is the equal and 
profitable balance to be maintained between the right 
of the individual to serve himself and the duty of gov- 
ernment to serve society. I say, not merely a clear 
knowledge of these, but a clear experimental knowledge 
of them as well. We hold it, for example, an indis- 
putable principle of law in a free state that there should 
be freedom of speech, and yet we have a law of libel. 
No man, we say, may speak that which wounds his 
neighbor’s reputation unless there be public need to 
speak it. Moreover we will judge of that need in a 
rough and ready fashion. Let twelve ordinary men, 
empanelled as a jury, say whether the wound was justly 
given and of necessity. ‘“The truth of the matter is 
very simple when stripped of all ornaments of speech,” 
says an eminent English judge. ‘“‘It is neither more nor 
less than this: that a man may publish anything which 
twelve of his fellow countrymen think is not blamable.”’ 
It is plain, therefore, that in this case at least we do 
not inquire curiously concerning the Rights of Man, 
which do not seem susceptible of being stated in terms 
of social obligation, but content ourselves with asking, 
“What are the rights of men living together, amongst 
whom there must be order and fair give and take?” 
And our law of libel is only one instance out of many. 
We treat all rights in like practical fashion. But a 
people must obviously have had experience to treat them 
so. You have here one image in the mirror of self- 
government. 

Do not leave the mirror before you see another. You 
cannot call a miscellaneous people, unknit, scattered, 
diverse of race and speech and habit, a nation, a com- 
munity. That, at least, we got by serving under kings: 
we got the feeling and the organic structure of a com- 


438 COLLEGE AND STATE 


“munity. No people can form a community or be wisely 
subjected to common forms of government who are as 
diverse and as heterogeneous as the people of the Phil- 
ippine Islands. ‘They are in no wise knit together. 
They are of many races, of many stages of development, 
economically, socially, politically disintegrate, without 
community of feeling because without community of 
life, contrasted alike in experience and in habit, having 
nothing in common except that they have lived for hun- 
dreds of years together under a government which held 
them always where they were when it first arrested 
their development. You may imagine the problem of 

_ self-government and of growth for such a people,—if 

\.so be you have an imagination and are no doctrinaire. 
If there is difficulty in our own government here at 
home because the several sections of our own country 
are disparate and at different stages of development, 
what shall we expect, and what patience shall we not 
demand of ourselves, with regard to our belated wards 
beyond the Pacific? We have here among ourselves 
hardly sufficient equality of social and economic condi- 
tions to breed full community of feeling. We have 
learned of our own experience what the problem of self- 
government is in such a case. 

That liberty and self-government are things of in- 
finite difficulty and nice accommodation we above all 
other peoples ought to know who have had every ad- 
venture in their practice. Our very discontent with the 
means we have taken to keep our people clear-eyed and 
steady in the use of their institutions is evidence of our 
appreciation of what is required to sustain them. We 
have set up an elaborate system of popular education, 
and have made the maintenance of that system a func- 
tion of government, upon the theory that only sys- 
tematic training can give the quick intelligence, the 
“variety of information and excellence of discretion” 
needed by a self-governed people. We expect as much 
from school-teachers as from governors in the Phil- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 439 


ippines and in Porto Rico: we expect from them the 
morale that is to sustain our work there. And yet, 
when teachers have done their utmost and the school 
bills are paid, we doubt, and know that we have reason 
to doubt, the efiicacy of what we have done. Books 
can but set the mind free, can but give it the freedom 
of the world of thought. The world of affairs has yet 
to be attempted, and the schooling of action must sup- 
plement the schooling of the written page. Men who 
have an actual hand in government, men who vote and 
sustain by their thoughts the whole movement of affairs, 
men who have the making or the confirming of policies, 
must have reasonable hopes, must act within the rea- 
sonable bounds set by hard experience. 

By education, no doubt, you acquaint men, while they 
are yet young and quick to take impressions, with the 
character and spirit of the polity they live under; give 
them some sentiment of respect for it, put them in the 
air that has always lain about it, and prepare them to 
take the experience that awaits them. But it is from 
the polity itself and their own contact with it that they 
must get their actual usefulness in affairs, and only that 
contact, intelligently made use of, makes good citizens. 
We would not have them remain children always and 
act always on the preconceptions taken out of the books 
they have studied. Life is their real master and tutor 
in affairs. 

And so the characters of the polity men live under 
has always had a deep significance in our thoughts. Our 
greater statesmen have been men steeped in a thoughtful 
philosophy of politics, men who pondered the effect 
of this institution and that upon morals and the life 
of society, and thought of character when they spoke 
of affairs. ‘They have taught us that the best polity is‘ 
that which most certainly produces the habit and the 
spirit of civic duty, and which calls with the most stir- 
ring and persuasive voice to the leading characters of 
the nation to come forth and give it direction. It must 


440 COLLEGE AND STATE 


be a polity which shall stimulate, which shall breed emu- 
lation, which shall make men seek honor by seeking 
service. [hese are the ideals which have formed our 
institutions, and which shall mend them when they need 
reform. We need good leaders more than an excellent 
mechanism of action in charters and constitutions. We 
need men of devotion as much as we need good laws. 
The two cannot be divorced and self-government sur- 
vive. 

It is this thought that distresses us when we look 
upon our cities and our states and see them ruled by 
bosses. Our methods of party organization have pro- 
duced bosses, and they are as natural and inevitable a 
product of our politics, no doubt, at any rate for the 
time being and until we can see our way to better things, 
as the walking delegate and the union president are 
of the contest between capital and federated labor. Both 
the masters of strikes and the masters of caucuses are 
able men, too, with whom we must needs deal with our 
best wits about us. But they are not, if they will par- 
don me for saying so, the leading characters I had in 
mind when I said that the excellence of a polity might 
be judged by the success with which it calls the leading 
characters of a nation forth to its posts of command. 
The polity which breeds bosses breeds managing talents 
rather than leading characters,—very excellent things 
in themselves, but not the highest flower of politics. 
The power to govern and direct primaries, combine 
primaries for the control of conventions, and use con- 
ventions for the nomination of candidates and the 
formulation of platforms agreed upon beforehand is an 
eminently useful thing in itself, and cannot be dispensed 
with, it may be, in democratic countries, where men 
must act, not helter skelter, but in parties, and with a 
certain party discipline, not easily thrown off; but it is 
not the first product of our politics we should wish to 
export to Porto Rico and the Philippines. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 441 


No doubt our study of these things which lie at the 
front of our own lives, and which must be handled in 
our own progress, will teach us how to be better mas- 
ters and tutors to those whom we govern. We have 
come to full maturity with this new century of our na- 
tional existence and to full self-consciousness as a na- 
tion. And the day of our isolation is past. We shall 
learn much ourselves now that we stand closer to other 
nations and compare ourselves first with one and again 
with another. Moreover, the centre of gravity has 
shifted in the action of our federal government. It 
has shifted back to where it was at the opening of the 
last century, in that early day when we were passing 
from the gristle to the bone of our growth. For the 
first twenty-six years that we lived under our federal 
Constitution foreign affairs, the sentiment and policy 
of nations oversea, dominated our politics, and our 
Presidents were our leaders. And now the same thing 
has come about again. Once more it is our place among 
the nations that we think of; once more our Presidents 
are our leaders. 

The centre of our party management shifts accord- 
ingly. We no longer stop upon questions of what this 
state wants or that, what this section will demand or 
the other, what this boss or that may do to attach his 
machine to the government. ‘The scale of our thought 
is national again. We are sensitive to airs that come 
to us from off the seas. ‘The President and his ad- 
visers stand upon our chief coign of observation, and we 
mark their words as we did not till this change came. 
And this centring of our thoughts, this looking for 
guidance in things which mere managing talents cannot 
handle, this union of our hopes, will not leave us what 
we were when first it came. Here is a new world for 
us. Here is a new life to which to adjust our ideals. 

It is by the widening of vision that nations, as men,~ 
grow and are made great. We need not fear the ex-/ 
panding scene. It was plain destiny that we should 


442 COLLEGE AND STATE 


come to this, and if we have kept our ideals clear, un- 
marred, commanding through the great century and the 
moving scenes that made us a nation, we may keep them 
also through the century that shall see us a great power 
in the world. Let us put our leading characters at 
the front; let us pray that vision may come with power; 
let us ponder our duties like men of conscience and tem- 
per our ambitions like men who seek to serve, not to 
subdue, the world; let us lift our thoughts to the level 
of the great tasks that await us, and bring a great age 
in with the coming of our day of strength. 


PRINCETON FOR THE NATION’S SERVICE 


INAUGURAL ADDRESS AS PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON UNI- 
VERSITY, OCTOBER 25,1902. FROMTHE “PRINCETON 
ALUMNI WEEKLY,’ NOVEMBER I, 1902, VOL. III, 
NO. 6, PP. 89-98. 


Sk years ago I had the honor of standing in this 
place to speak of the memories with which Prince- 
ton men heartened themselves as they looked back a 
century and a half to the founding of their college. To- 
day my task is more delicate, more difficult. Standing 
here in the light of those older days, we must now as- 
sess our present purposes and powers and sketch the 
creed by which we shall be willing to live in the days 
to come. We are but men of a single generation in the 
long life of an institution which shall still be young when 
we are dead, but while we live her life is in us. What 
we conceive she conceives. In planning for Princeton, 
moreover, we are planning for the country. ‘The serv- 
ice of institutions of learning is not private, but public. 
It is plain what the nation needs as its affairs grow 
more and more complex and its interests begin to touch 
the ends of the earth. It needs efficient and enlight- 
ened men. The universities of the country must take 
part in supplying them. 

American universities serve a free nation whose prog- 
ress, whose power, whose prosperity, whose happiness, 
whose integrity depend upon individual initiative and 
the sound sense and equipment of the rank and file. 
Their history, moreover, has set them apart to a char- 
acter and service of their own. ‘They are not mere 
seminaries of scholars. They never can be. Most 
of them, the greatest of them and the most distin- 


443 


444 COLLEGE AND STATE 


guished, were first of all great colleges before they be-. 
came universities; and their task is two-fold: the pro- 
duction of a great body of informed and thoughtful 
men and the production of a small body of trained 
scholars and investigators. It is one of their functions 
to take large bodies of young men up to the places of 
outlook whence the world of thought and affairs is 
to be viewed; it is another of their functions to take 
some men, a little more mature, a little more studious, 
men self-selected by aptitude and industry, into the 
quiet libraries and laboratories where the close con- 
tacts of study are learned which yield the world new 
insight into the processes of nature, of reason, and of 
the human spirit. These two functions are not to be 
performed separately, but side by side, and are to be 
informed with one spirit, the spirit of enlightenment, 
a spirit of learning which is neither superficial nor pe- 
dantic, which values life more than it values the mere 
acquisitions of the mind. 

Universities, we have learned to think, include within 
their scope, when complete, schools of law, of medicine, 
of theology, and of those more recondite mechanic arts, 
such as the use of electricity, upon which the skilled 
industry of the modern world is built up; and, though 
in dwelling upon such an association of schools as of 
the gist of the matter in our definitions of a university, 
we are relying upon historical accidents rather than 
upon essential principles for our conceptions, they are 
accidents which show the happy order and system with 
which things often come to pass. Though the univer- 
sity may dispense with professional schools, profes- 
sional schools may not dispense with the university. 
Professional schools have nowhere their right atmos- 
phere and association except where they are parts of a 
university and share its spirit and method. ‘They must 
love learning as well as professional success in order 
to have their perfect usefulness. This is not the verdict 
of the universities merely but of the professional men 


COLLEGE AND STATE 4.4.5 


themselves, spoken out of hard experience of the facts 
of business. It was but the other day that the Society 
for the Promotion of Engineering Education endorsed 
the opinion of their president, Mr. Eddy, that the cry- 
ing need of the engineering profession was men whose 
technical knowledge and proficiency rest upon a broad 
basis of general culture which should make them free 
of the wider worlds of learning and experience, which 
should give them largeness of view, judgment, and easy 
knowledge of men. The modern world nowhere shows 
a closeted profession shut in to a narrow round of 
technical functions to which no knowledge of the outside 
world need ever penetrate. Whatever our calling, our 
thoughts must often be afield among men of many kinds, 
amidst interests as various as the phases of modern 
life. The managing minds of the world, even the effi- 
cient working minds of the world, must be equipped for 
a mastery whose chief characteristic is adaptability, 
play, an initiative which transcends the bounds of mere 
technical training. Technical schools whose training is 
not built up on the foundations of a broad and general 
discipline cannot impart this. The stuff they work upon 
must be prepared for them by processes which produce 
fibre and elasticity, and their own methods must be 
shot through with the impulses of the university. 

It is this that makes our age and our task so inter- 
esting: this complex interdependence and interrelation 
of all the processes which prepare the mind for effectual 
service: this necessity that the merchant and the financier 
should have travelled minds, the engineer a knowledge 
of books and men, the lawyer a wide view of affairs, 
the physician a familiar acquaintance with the abstract 
data of science, and that the closeted scholar himself 
should throw his windows open to the four quarters of 
the world. Every considerable undertaking has come 
to be based on knowledge, on thoughtfulness, on the 
masterful handling of men and facts. The university 
must stand in the midst, where the roads of thought 


446 COLLEGE AND STATE 


and knowledge interlace and cross, and, building upon 
some coign of vantage, command them all. 

It has happened that throughout two long genera- 
tions,—long because filled with the industrial and social 
transformation of the world,—the thought of studious 
men has been bent upon devising methods by which spe- 
cial aptitudes could be developed, detailed investiga- 
tions carried forward, inquiry at once broadened and 
deepened to meet the scientific needs of the age, knowl- 
edge extended and made various and yet exact by the 
minute and particular researches of men who devoted all 
the energies of their minds to a single task. And so 
we have gained much, though we have also lost much 
that must be recovered. We have gained immensely 
in knowledge but we have lost system. We have ac- 
quired an admirable, sober passion for accuracy. Our 
pulses have been quickened, moreover, by discovery. The 
world of learning has been transformed. No study 
has stood still. Scholars have won their fame, not by 
erudition, but by exploration, the conquest of new terri- 
tory, the addition of infinite detail to the map of knowl- 
edge. And so we have gained a splendid proficiency 
in investigation. We know the right methods of ad- 
vanced study. We have made exhaustive record of the 
questions waiting to be answered, the doubts waiting 
to be resolved, in every domain of inquiry; thousands 
of problems once unsolved, apparently insoluble, we 
have reduced to their elements and settled, and their 
answers have been added to the commonplaces of 
knowledge. But, meanwhile, what of the preliminary 
training of specialists, what of the general foundations 
of knowledge, what of the general equipment of mind 
which all men must have who are to serve this busy, this 
sophisticated generation? 

Probably no one is to blame for the neglect of the 
general into which we have been led by our eager pur- 
suit of the particular. Every age has lain under the 
reproach of doing but one thing at a time, of having 


COLLEGE AND STATE 447 


some one signal object for the sake of which other 
things were slighted or ignored. But the plain fact is, 
that we have so spread and diversified the scheme of 
knowledge in our day that it has lost coherence. We 
have dropped the threads of system in our teaching. 
And system begins at the beginning. We must find the 
common term for college and university; and those who 
have great colleges at the heart of the universities they 
are trying to develop are under a special compulsion 
to find it. Learning is not divided. Its kingdom and 
government are centred, unitary, single. The processes 
of instruction which fit a large body of young men to 
serve their generation with powers released and fit 
for great tasks ought also to serve as the initial proc- 
esses by which scholars and investigators are made. 
They ought to be but the first parts of the method by 
which the crude force of untrained men is reduced to the 
expert uses of civilization. ‘There may come a day 
when general study will be no part of the function of a 
university, when it shall have been handed over, as 
some now talk of handing it over, to the secondary 
schools, after the German fashion; but that day will not 
be ours, and I, for one, do not wish to see it come. The 
masters who guide the youngsters who pursue general 
studies are very useful neighbors for those who prose- 
cute detailed inquiries and devote themselves to spe- 
cial tasks. No investigator can afford to keep his doors 
shut against the comradeships of the wide world of let- 
ters and of thought. 

To have a great body of undergraduates crowding 
our classrooms and setting the pace of our lives must 
always be a very wholesome thing. ‘These young fel- 
lows, who do not mean to make finished scholars of 
themselves, but who do mean to learn from their elders, 
now at the outset of their lives, what the thoughts of 
the world have been and its processes of progress, in 
order that they may start with light about them, and not 
doubt or darkness, learning in the brief span of four 


448 COLLEGE AND STATE 


years what it would else take them half a lifetime to 
discover by mere contact with men, must teach us the 
real destiny with which knowledge came into the world. 
Its mission is enlightenment and edification, and these 
young gentlemen shall keep us in mind of this. 

The age has hurried us, has shouldered us out of the 
old ways, has bidden us be moving and look to the 
cares of a practical generation; and we have suffered 
ourselves to be a little disconcerted. No doubt we were 
once pedants. It is a happy thing that the days have 
gone by when the texts we studied loomed bigger to our 
view than the human spirit that underlay them. But 
there are some principles of which we must not let go. 
We must not lose sight of that fine conception of a 
general training which led our fathers, in the days 
when men knew how to build great states, to build great 
colleges also to sustain them. No man who knows the 
world has ever supposed that a day would come when 
every young man would seek a college training. The 
college is not for the majority who carry forward the 
common labour of the world, nor even for those who 
work at the skilled handicrafts which multiply the con- 
veniences and the luxuries of the complex modern life. 
It is for the minority who plan, who conceive, who 
superintend, who mediate between group and group 
and must see the wide stage as a whole. Democratic 
nations must be served in this wise no less than those 
whose leaders are chosen by birth and privilege; and the 
college is no less democratic because it is for those 
who play a special part. I know that there are men 
of genius who play these parts of captaincy and yet 
have never been in the classrooms of a college, whose 
only school has been the world itself. The world is an 
excellent school for those who have vision and self-disci- 
pline enough to use it. It works in this wise, in part, 
upon us all. Raw lads are made men of by the mere 
sweep of their lives through the various schools of expe- 
rience. It is this very sweep of life that we wish to 


COLLEGE AND STATE 449 


bring to the consciousness of young men by the shorter 
processes of the college. We have seen the adaptation 
take place; we have seen crude boys made fit in four 
years to become men of the world. 

Every man who plays a leading or conceiving part 
in any affair must somehow get this schooling of his 
spirit, this quickening and adaptation of his perceptions. 
He must either spread the process through his lifetime 
and get it by an extraordinary gift of insight and upon 
his own initiative, or else he must get it by the al- 
chemy of mind practiced in college halls. We ought 
distinctly to set forth in our philosophy of this matter 
the difference between a man’s preparation for the spe- 
cific and definite tasks he is to perform in the world and 
that general enlargement of spirit and release of powers 
which he shall need if his task is not to crush and be- 
little him. When we insist that a certain general edu- 
cation shall precede all special training which is not 
merely mechanic in its scope and purpose, we mean sim- 
ply that every mind needs for its highest serviceability 
a certain preliminary orientation, that it may get its 
bearings and release its perceptions for a wide and 
catholic view. We must deal in college with the spirits 
of men, not with their fortunes. Here, in history and 
philosophy and literature and science, are the experi- 
ences of the world summed up. ‘These are but so many 
names which we give to the records of what men have 
done and thought and comprehended. If we be not 
pedants, if we be able to get at the spirit of the matter, 
we shall extract from them the edification and enlighten- 
ment as of those who have gone the long journey of 
experience with the race. 

There are two ways of preparing a young man for his 
life work. One is to give him the skill and special 
knowledge which shall make a good tool, an excellent 
bread-winning tool, of him; and for thousands of young 
men that way must be followed. It is a good way. It 
is honorable, it is indispensable. But it is not for the 


450 COLLEGE AND STATE 


college, and it never can be. The college should seek 
to make the men whom it receives something more than 
excellent servants of a trade or skilled practitioners of 
a profession. It should give them elasticity of faculty 
and breadth of vision, so that they shall have a surplus 
of mind to expend, not upon their profession only, for 
its liberalization and enlargement, but also upon the 
broader interests which lie about them, in the spheres 
in which they are to be, not breadwinners merely, but 
citizens as well, and in their own hearts, where they are 
to grow to the stature of real nobility. It is this free 
capital of mind the world most stands in need of,—this 
free capital that awaits investment in undertakings, 
spiritual as well as material, which advance the race 
and help all men to a better life. 

And are we to do this great thing by the old disci- 
pline of Greek, Latin, Mathematics, and English? The 
day has gone by when that is possible. The circle of 
liberal studies is too much enlarged, the area of gen- 
eral learning is too much extended, to make it any longer 
possible to make these few things stand for all. Sci- 
ence has opened a new world of learning, as great as 
the old. ‘The influence of science has broadened and 
transformed old themes of study and created new, and 
all the boundaries of knowledge are altered. In the 
days of our grandfathers all learning was literary, was 
of the book; the phenomena of nature were brought to- 
gether under the general terms of an encyclopedic 
Natural Philosophy. Now the quiet rooms where once 
a few students sat agaze before a long table at which, 
with a little apparatus before him, a lecturer discoursed 
of the laws of matter and of force are replaced by great 
laboratories, physical, chemical, biological, in which the 
pupil’s own direct observation and experiment take the 
place of the conning of mere theory and generalization 
and men handle the immediate stuff of which nature is 
made. Museums of natural history, of geology, of 
paleontology stretch themselves amidst our lecture 


COLLEGE AND STATE 451 


rooms, for demonstration of what we say of the life 
and structure of the globe. The telescope, the spectro- 
scope, not the text-book merely, are our means of teach- 
ing the laws and movements of the sky. An age of 
science has transmuted speculation into knowledge and 
doubled the dominion of the mind. Heavens and earth 
swing together in a new universe of knowledge. And 
so it is impossible that the old discipline should stand 
alone, to serve us as an education. With it alone we 
should get no introduction into the modern world either 
of thought or of affairs. ‘The mind of the modern 
student must be carried through a wide range of studies 
in which science shall have a place not less distinguished 
than that accorded literature, philosophy or politics. 
But we must observe proportion and remember what 
it is that we seek. We seek in our general education, 
not universal knowledge, but the opening up of the 
mind to a catholic appreciation of the best achievements 
of men and the best processes of thought since days 
of thought set in. We seek to apprise young men of 
what has been settled and made sure of, of the thinking 
that has been carried through and made an end of. We 
seek to set them securely forward at the point at which 
the mind of the race has definitely arrived, and save 
them the trouble of attempting the journey over again, 
so that they may know from the outset what relation 
their own thought and effort bear to what the world 
has already done. We speak of the “‘disciplinary”’ studies 
through which a boy is put in his school days and during 
the period of his introduction into the full privileges 
of college work, having in our thought the mathematics 
of arithmetic, elementary algebra, and geometry, the 
Greek and Latin texts and grammars, the elements of 
English and French or German; but a better, truer 
name for them were to be desired. They are indeed 
disciplinary. The mind takes fibre, facility, strength, 
adaptability, certainty of touch from handling them, 
when the teacher knows his art and their power. But 


452 COLLEGE AND STATE 


they are disciplinary only because of their definiteness 
and their established method: and they take their de- 
terminateness from their age and perfection. It is their 
age and completeness that render them so serviceable 
and so suitable for the first processes of education. By 
their means the boy is informed of the bodies of knowl- 
edge which are not experimental but settled, definitive, 
fundamental. This is the stock upon which time out of 
mind all the thoughtful world has traded. These have 
been food of the mind for long generations. 

It is in this view of the matter that we get an ex- 
planation of the fact that the classical languages of an- 
tiquity afford better discipline and are a more indis- 
pensable means of culture than any language of our 
own day except the language, the intimate language of 
our own thought, which is for us universal coin of ex- 
change in the intellectual world, and must have its values 
determined to a nicety before we pay it out. No mod- 
ern language is definite, classically made up. Modern 
tongues, moreover, carry the modern Babel of voices. 
The thoughts they utter fluctuate and change; the 
phrases they speak alter and are dissolved with every 
change of current in modern thought or impulse. They 
have, first or last, had the same saturations of thought 
that our own language has had; they carry the same 
atmosphere; in traversing their pleasant territory, we 
see only different phases of our own familiar world, the 
world of our own experience; and, valuable as it is to 
have this various view of the world we live in and send 
our minds upon their travels up and down the modern 
age, it is not fundamental, it is not an indispensable 
first process of training. It can be postponed. The 
classical literatures give us, in tones and with an au- 
thentic accent we can nowhere else hear, the thoughts 
of an age we cannot visit. They contain airs of a time. 
not our own, unlike our own, and yet its foster parent. 
To these things was the modern thinking world first 
bred. In them speaks a time naive, pagan, an early 


COLLEGE AND STATE 453 


morning day when men looked upon the earth while it 
was fresh, untrodden by crowding thought, an age when 
the mind moved as it were without prepossessions and 
with an unsophisticated, childlike curiosity, a season 
apart during which those seats upon the Mediterranean 
seem the first seats of thoughtful men. We shall not 
anywhere else get a substitute for it. —The modern mind 
has been built upon that culture and there is no authentic 
equivalent. 

Drill in the mathematics stands in the same category 
with familiar knowledge of the thought and speech of 
classical antiquity, because in them also we get the 
lifelong accepted discipline of the race, the processes 
of pure reasoning which lie at once at the basis of sci- 
ence and at the basis of philosophy, grounded upon ob- 
servation and physical fact and yet abstract, and of the 
very stuff of the essential processes of the mind, a bridge 
between reason and nature. Here, too, as in the classics, 
is a definitive body of knowledge and of reason, a disci- 
pline which has been made test of through long genera- 
tions, a method of thought which has in all ages steadied, 
perfected, enlarged, strengthened and given precision 
to the powers of the mind. Mathematical drill is an 
introduction of the boy’s mind to the most definitely 
settled rational experiences of the world. 

I shall attempt no proof that English also is of the 
fundamental group of studies. You will not require 
me to argue that no man has been made free of the 
world of thought who does not know the literature, 
the idiomatic flavor, and the masterful use of his own 
tongue. 

But, if we cannot doubt that these great studies are 
fundamental, neither can we doubt that the circle of 
fundamental studies has widened in our day and that 
education, even general education, has been extended 
to new boundaries. And that chiefly because science 
has had its credentials accepted as of the true patriciate 
of learning. It is as necessary that the lad should 


454 COLLEGE AND STATE 


be inducted into the thinking of the modern time as it 
is that he should be carefully grounded in the old, ac- 
cepted thought which has stood test from age to age; 
and the thought of the modern time is based upon sci- 
ence. It is only a question of choice in a vast field. 
Special developments of science, the parts which lie in 
controversy, the parts which are as yet but half built 
up by experiment and hypothesis, do not constitute the 
proper subject matter of general education. For that 
you need, in the field of science as in every other field, 
the bodies of knowledge which are most definitively de- 
termined and which are most fundamental. Undoubt- 
edly the fundamental sciences are physics, chemistry 
and biology. Physics and chemistry afford a system- 
atic body of knowledge as abundant for instruction, as 
definitive almost, as mathematics itself; and biology, 
young as it is, has already supplied us with a scheme 
of physical life which lifts its study to the place of a 
distinctive discipline. These great bodies of knowledge 
claim their place at the foundation of liberal training 
not merely for our information but because they aftord 
us direct introduction into the most essential analytical 
and rational processes of scientific study, impart pene- 
tration, precision, candour, openness of mind, and afford 
the close contacts of concrete thinking. And there stand 
alongside of these geology and astronomy, whose part 
in general culture, aside from their connection with 
physics, mechanics and chemistry, is to apply to the 
mind the stimulation which comes from being brought 
into the presence and in some sort into the comprehen- 
sion of stupendous, systematized physical fact,—from 
seeing nature in the mass and system of her might and 
structure. These, too, are essential parts of the wide 
scheme which the college must plot out. And when we 
have added to these the manifold discipline of philoso- 
phy, the indispensable instructions of history, and the 
enlightenments of economic and political study, and to 
these the modern languages which are the tools of 


COLLEGE AND STATE 455 


scholarship, we stand confused. How are we to marshal 
this host of studies within a common plan which shall 
not put the pupil out of breath? 

No doubt we must make choice among them, and 
suffer the pupil himself to make choice. But the choice 
that we make must be the chief choice, the choice the 
pupil makes, the subordinate choice. Since he cannot 
in the time at his disposal go the grand tour of accepted 
modern knowledge, we who have studied the geogra- 
phy of learning and who have observed several genera- 
tions of men attempt the journey must instruct him 
how in a brief space he may see most of the world, and 
he must choose only which one of several tours that 
we may map out he will take. Else there is no differ- 
ence between young men and old, between the novice 
and the man of experience, in fundamental matters of 
choice. We must supply the synthesis and must see to 
it that, whatever group of studies the student selects, 
it shall at least represent the round whole, contain all 
the elements of modern knowledge, and be itself a com- 
plete circle of general subjects. Princeton can never 
have any uncertainty of view on that point. 

And that not only because we conceive it to be our 
business to give a general, liberalizing, enlightening 
training to men who do not mean to go on to any spe- 
cial work by which they make men of science or scholars 
of themselves or skilled practitioners of a learned pro- 
fession, but also because we would create a right atmos- 
phere for special study. Critics of education have re- 
cently given themselves great concern about over-special- 
ization. The only specialists about whom, I think, the 
thoughtful critic of education need give himself any 
serious concern are the specialists who have never had 
any general education in which to, give their special 
studies wide rootage and nourishment. The true Amer- 
ican university seems to me to get its best characteristic, 
its surest guarantee of sane and catholic learning, from 
the presence at its very heart of a college of liberal 


456 COLLEGE AND STATE 


arts. Its vital union with the college gives it, it seems 
to me, the true university atmosphere, a pervading sense 
of the unity and unbroken circle of learning,—not so 
much because of the presence of a great body of under- 
graduates in search of general training (because until 
these youngsters get what they seek they create ideals 
more by their lack than by their achievement), as be- 
cause of the presence of a great body of teachers whose 
life work it is to find the general outlooks of knowledge 
and give vision of them every day from quiet rooms 
which, while they talk, shall seem to command all the 
prospects of the wide world. 

I should dread to see those who guide special study 
and research altogether excused from undergraduate in- 
struction, should dread to see them withdraw them- 
selves altogether from the broad and general survey 
of the subjects of which they have sought to make them- 
selves masters. I should equally despair of seeing any 
student made a truly serviceable specialist who had not 
turned to his specialty in the spirit of a broad and 
catholic learning,—unless, indeed, he were one of those 
rare spirits who once and again appear amongst us, 
whose peculiar, individual privilege it is to have safe 
vision of but a little segment of truth and yet keep their 
poise and reason. It is not the education that concen- 
trates that is to be dreaded, but the education that nar- 
rows,—that is narrow from the first. I should wish to 
see every student made, not a man of his task, but a 
man of the world, whatever his world may be. If it 
be the world of learning, then he should be a conscious 
and a broad-minded citizen of it. If it be the world of 
letters, his thought should run free upon the whole field 
of it. If it be the world of affairs, he should move 
amidst affairs like a man of thought. What we seek 
in education is a full liberation of the faculties, and 
the man who has not some surplus of thought and en- 
ergy to expend outside the narrow circle of his own 
task and interest is a dwarfed, uneducated man. We 


COLLEGE AND STATE 457 


judge the range and excellence of every man’s abilities 
by their play outside the task by which he earns his liveli- 
hood. Does he merely work, or does he also look 
abroad and plan? Does he, at the least, enlarge the 
thing he handles? No task, rightly done, is truly pri- 
vate. It is part of the world’s work. The subtle and 
yet universal connections of things are what the truly 
educated man, be he man of science, man of letters, or 
statesman, must keep always in his thought, if he would 
fit his work to the work of the world. His adjust- 
ment is as important as his energy. 

We mean, so soon as our generous friends have ar- 
ranged their private finances in such a way as to enable 
them to release for our use enough money for the pur- 
pose, to build a notable graduate college. I say ‘“‘build” 
because it will be not only a body of teachers and stu- 
dents but also a college of residence, where men shall 
live together in the close and wholesome comradeships 
of learning. We shall build it, not apart, but as nearly 
as may be at the very heart, the geographical heart, of 
the university; and its comradeship shall be for young 
men and old, for the novice as well as for the graduate. 
It will constitute but a single term in the scheme of 
coordination which is our ideal. The windows of the 
graduate college must open straight upon the walks 
and quadrangles and lecture halls of the studium gen- 
erale. 

In our attempt to escape the pedantry and narrow- 
ness of the old fixed curriculum we have, no doubt, gone 
so far as to be in danger of losing the old ideals. Our 
utilitarianism has carried us so far afield that we are in 
a fair way to forget the real utilities of the mind. No 
doubt the old, purely literary training made too much 
of the development of mere taste, mere delicacy of per- 
ception, but our modern training makes too little. We 
pity the young child who, ere its physical life has come 
to maturity, is put to some task which will dwarf and 
narrow it into a mere mechanic tool. We know that 


458 COLLEGE AND STATE 


it needs first its free years in the sunlight and fresh 
air, its irresponsible youth. And yet we do not hesitate 
to deny to the young mind its irresponsible years of 
mere development in the free air of general studies. We 
have too ignorantly served the spirit of the age,—have 
made no bold and sanguine attempt to instruct and 
lead it. Its call is for efficiency, but not for narrow, 
purblind efficiency. Surely no other age ever had tasks 
which made so shrewdly for the testing of the general 
powers of the mind. No sort of knowledge, no sort of 
training of the perceptions and the facility of the mind 
could come amiss to the modern man of affairs or the 
modern student. A general awakening of the faculties, 
and then a close and careful adaptation to some special 
task is the programme of mere prudence for every man 
who would succeed. 

And there are other things besides mere material suc- 
cess with which we must supply our generation. It 
must be supplied with men who care more for princi- 
ples than for money, for the right adjustments of life 
than for the gross accumulations of profit. The prob- 
lems that call for sober thoughtfulness and mere de- 
votion are as pressing as those which call for practical 
eficiency. We are here not merely to release the facul- 
ties of men for their own use, but also to quicken their 
sacial understanding, instruct their consciences, and 
give them the catholic vision of those who know their 
just relations to their fellow men. Here in America, 
for every man touched with nobility, for every man 
touched with the spirit of our institutions, social serv- 
ice is the high law of duty, and every American univer- 
sity must square its standards by that law or lack its 
national title. It is serving the nation to give men the 
enlightenments of a general training; it is serving the 
nation to equip fit men for thorough scientific investiga- 
tion and for the tasks of exact scholarship, for science 
and scholarship carry the truth forward from genera- 
tion to generation and give the certain touch of knowl- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 459 


edge to the processes of life. But the whole service 
demanded is not rendered until something is added to 
the mere training of the undergraduate and the mere 
equipment of the investigator, something ideal and of 
the very spirit of all action. ‘The final synthesis of 
learning is in philosophy. You shall most clearly judge 
the spirit of a university if you judge it by the philoso- 
phy it teaches; and the philosophy of conduct is what 
every wise man should wish to derive from his knowl- 
edge of the thoughts and the affairs of the generations 
that have gone before him. We are not put into this 
world to sit still and know; we are put into it to act. 

It is true that in order to learn men must for a little 
while withdraw from action, must seek some quiet place 
of remove from the bustle of affairs, where their 
thoughts may run clear and tranquil, and the heats of 
business be for the time put off; but that cloistered 
refuge is no place to dream in. It is a place for the 
first conspectus of the mind, for a thoughtful poring 
upon the map of life; and the boundaries which should 
emerge to the mind’s eye are not more the intellectual 
than the moral boundaries of thought and action. I do 
not see how any university can afford such an outlook 
if its teachings be not informed with the spirit of re- 
ligion and that the religion of Christ, and with the en- 
ergy of a positive faith. The argument for efficiency 
in education can have no permanent validity if the efh- 
ciency sought be not moral as well as intellectual. The 
ages of strong and definite moral impulse have been the 
ages of achievement; and the moral impulses which have 
lifted highest have come from Christian peoples,—the 
moving history of our own nation were proof enough of 
that. Moral efficiency is, in the last analysis, the funda- 
mental argument for liberal culture. A merely literary 
education, got out of books and old literature, is a poor 
thing enough if the teacher stick at grammatical and 
syntactical drill; but if it be indeed an introduction into 
the thoughtful labors of men of all generations it may 


460 COLLEGE AND STATE 


be made the prologue to the mind’s emancipation: its 
emancipation from narrowness,—from narrowness of 
sympathy, of perception, of motive, of purpose, and of 
hope. And the deep fountains of Christian teaching are 
its most refreshing springs. 

I have said already, let me say again, that in such 
a place as this we have charge, not of men’s fortunes, 
but of their spirits. This is not the place in which to 
teach men their specific tasks,—except their tasks be 
those of scholarship and investigation; it is the place 
in which to teach them the relations which all tasks 
bear to the work of the world. Some men there are who 
are condemned to learn only the technical skill by which 
they are to live; but these are not the men whose privi- 
lege it is to come to a university. University men ought 
to hold themselves bound to walk the upper roads of 
usefulness which run along the ridges and command 
views of the general fields of life. This is why I be- 
lieve general training, with no particular occupation in 
view, to be the very heart and essence of university 
training, and the indispensable foundation of every spe- 
cial development of knowledge or of aptitude that is to 
lift a man to his profession or a scholar to his func- 
tion of investigation. 

I have studied the history of America; I have seen 
her grow great in the paths of liberty and of progress 
by following after great ideals. Every concrete thing 
that she has done has seemed to rise out of some ab- 
stract principle, some vision of the mind. Her great- 
est victories have been the victories of peace and of 
humanity. And in days quiet and troubled alike Prince- 
ton has stood for the nation’s service, to produce men 
and patriots. Her national tradition began with John 
Witherspoon, the master, and James Madison, the pu- 
pil, and has not been broken until this day. I do not 
know what the friends of this sound and tested founda- 
tion may have in store to build upon it; but whatever 
they add shall be added in that spirit, and with that con- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 461 


ception of duty. ‘There is no better way to build up 
learning and increase power. A new age is before us, 
in which, it would seem, we must lead the world. No 
doubt we shall set it an example unprecedented not only 
in the magnitude and telling perfection of our indus- 
tries and arts but also in the splendid scale and studied 
detail of our university establishments: the spirit of the 
age will lift us to every great enterprise. But the an- 
cient spirit of sound learning will also rule us; we shall 
demonstrate in our lecture rooms again and again, with 
increasing volume of proof, the old principles that have 
made us free and great; reading men shall read here 
the chastened thoughts that have kept us young and 
shall make us pure; the school of learning shall be the 
school of memory and of ideal hope; and the men who 
spring from our loins shall take their lineage from the 
founders of the republic. 


PRINCETON IDEALS! 


DELIVERED AT PRINCETON DINNER AT THE WALDORF- 
ASTORIA, DECEMBER 9, 1902. FROM THE “PRINCE- 
TON ALUMNI WEEKLY,’ DECEMBER I3, 1902, VOL. 
III, PP. 199-204. REPORTED STENOGRAPHICALLY 
AND CORRECTED BY MR. WILSON. 


I AM not vain enough to take this demonstration as 

an evidence of your admiration of me. I know 
what you have come here for. You have come here to 
express your gratification that a Princeton alumnus 
whom you know and have consorted with is now in com- 
mand of the ship which we all man. (Applause.) I 
know that the meaning of this company is that there is 
a life in the body of men who have gone out from 
Princeton that cannot be quenched and which cannot 
be resisted. ‘There are many things which Princeton 
needs, but she does not need life and vigor, she does 
not need the blood and the spirit of men to carry her 
standards and her cause forward. 

You will readily believe me when I say that I have 
been deeply moved by the scene which I look upon to- 
night. I am ordinarily, gentlemen, a very witty man, 
but all wit has been subdued in me by the spirit almost 
of solemnity which this scene brings upon me. I do 
not doubt that we have entered upon a new era, not 
because of anything that is in me, but because of the 
spirit that is in you. If you feel any tithe of that com- 
bined power which you show in demonstrations like this 
to-night, we are sure of the future of Princeton Uni- 
versity. I believe that the gentlemen who are with 
us from other institutions must have felt the pulse that 
is beating in this body to-night. No man can mistake 


* Title supplied by the editors. 
462 


COLLEGE AND STATE 463 


it and no man can sit here and not feel it; and I suppose 
that those who do not know us have wondered what 
bred this spirit amongst us. How did it happen that 
men so diverse in age and occupation and condition, so 
different in the circumstances of their lives and the ante- 
cedents of their fortunes, are bound together by this 
common tie, like boys and yet like men, with the feel- 
ing of boys and with the purpose of men? How did 
that happen? (Applause.) This is a thing bred by 
the spirit of a place, a place which the memory of every 
man here keeps as a sort of a shrine to which all his 
happiest thoughts return; a place in which his com- 
radeships, the dearest comradeships of his life have 
begun; a place in which he remembers some of the best 
impulses of his life to have begun; a place where when 
we walk we feel that we have renewed a spirit of al- 
legiance to the truth, to learning, to manhood, to that 
fair spirit of dealing man with man which makes the 
best part of the feeling of the American people. 

And all of this has been bred by life in a place the 
charm of which even strangers feel. I have marked 
how men who never saw that place before feel the spirit 
of it when they walk those streets and across that cam- 
pus; how they say “There is something in this place 
which we never felt anywhere else, some atmosphere 
which takes the imagination, which kindles enthusiasm, 
so that one can hardly leave here without feeling that 
he has been adopted into the Princeton family and has 
partaken of the Princeton allegiance.”’ No one fails to 
feel it. The freshman feels it in the midst of his 
miseries; the sophomore feels it in the midst of his 
pride; the junior and the senior in the midst of their 
leisure have time to feel it. (Laughter.) And by a 
simple device we have enhanced the spirit of the place. 
By the very simple device of building our new buildings 
in the Tudor Gothic style we seem to have added to 
Princeton the age of Oxford and of Cambridge; we 
have added a thousand years to the history of Prince- 


464 COLLEGE AND STATE 


ton by merely putting those lines in our buildings which 
point every man’s imagination to the historic traditions 
of learning in the English-speaking race. We have de- 
clared and acknowledged our derivation and lineage; 
we have said, ‘““This is the spirit in which we have been 
bred,” and as the imagination, as the recollection of 
classes yet to be graduated from Princeton are affected 
by the suggestions of that architecture, we shall find the 
past of this country married with the past of the world 
and shall know with what destiny we have come into 
the forefront of the nations, with the destiny of men 
who have gathered the best thinking of the world and 
wish to add to the politics of the world not heat, but 
light; the light that illuminates the path of nations and 
makes them know the errors as well as the wisdom of 
the past. 

Gentlemen, we have dreamed a dream in Princeton 
of how the charm of that place shall be enhanced. I 
need not tell you of the familiar map of that beautiful 
place. You know how naturally in the old historic cam- 
pus there is slowly forming a sort of circle and quad- 
rangle, a great quadrangle, a little town; that little 
town will presently close its lines from the Brokaw 
Building back of Prospect to where the Infirmary now 
stands and up Washington Road, and in that little 
town, girt about with buildings in the style that is his- 
toric, there will live the College of Liberal Arts, there 
will dwell all the high-spirited youngsters who repre- 
sent us in the ballfield, who represent us in the writing 
of the college periodicals, who carry the spirit and the 
go of the place in their veins. And there will then 
come in the midst of that friendly town another quad- 
rangle, a smaller quadrangle, more beautiful than any 
that has yet been built, and in that quadrangle there 
will live a little community, a community of graduate 
students, touched by the life in the midst of which they 
live, sympathetic with it, dominated by it, and yet going 
in and out like men bent upon the errands of the mind, 


COLLEGE AND STATE 465 


loving sport but not following sport, sympathizers with 
the undergraduate life but not taking part in the under- 
graduate life, rather seeming to remind men as they go 
to and fro that there are invisible things which men 
seek with the mind’s eye, that there is a life which no 
man has touched, which no man has seen, that there is 
something that makes free the very truth itself; and 
these men shall touch the spirit of the undergraduates, 
the youngsters shall wonder if there are not visions 
which are worth seeing, if there are not tasks in those 
closeted places that are worth doing, if there is not 
something immortal bred in the occupations of those 
men. (Applause.) Back of this little town, full of the 
visions of scholarship and of the diversions of sober, 
eager, ingenuous young men, there will stretch a fair 
garden open to the eye, where men shall see all the 
pleasant outlooks that that place commands; there shall 
be a girt of buildings down the avenue that leads to the 
woods below, and there shall run by those buildings a 
path which leads to the open quadrangles of the pro- 
fessional schools, upon which we shall look down as 
men look forward, look forward to their professional 
careers, look forward to the things in which they shall 
specifically serve the world, the quadrangle which shall 
house the men who are the students of jurisprudence, 
the students of law in all its scholarly outlooks, the men 
whose ambition it is not merely to seek their bread and 
butter by the practice of the law before the courts but 
whose ambition it is to supply the courts with the princi- 
ples by which they shall develop the law of the country; 
men who shall know the old and abandoned rootages 
of the court system of jurisprudence under which they 
live and who will be capable in moments critical and 
perplexing to give guidance to the development of the 
jurisprudence of this country; and then beyond that 
there will be the quadrangle containing those men who 
handle the force which runs the modern world of in- 
dustry, the School of Electrical Engineering. 


466 COLLEGE AND STATE 


The electrical engineer stands at the strategic center 
of the future industry of this country, and we cannot 
afford that the industry of this country should go with- 
out the touch of the Princeton spirit. (Applause.) The 
Princeton spirit, I think I don’t deceive myself in be- 
lieving, is a spirit which is touched with the ideals of 
service, which is touched with those ideals which ele- 
vate professions from the lower grades to the grades 
in which they are conspicuous, the grades from which 
men reach achievement. ‘There is a difference, gentle- 
men, between success and achievement. Achievement 
comes to the man who has forgotten himself and mar- 
ried himself and his mind to the task to which he has 
set himself, but success comes to the diligent man. 

And then where the woods has been closed about 
and all the fine outlooks are checked by the falling 
country, as it falls away to the lower lands below, where 
the soil is fertile, where it invites to cultivation, there 
will stand the great Museum of Natural History, a 
museum which Princeton needs now to relieve the groan- 
ing receptacles of Old North which holds priceless col- 
lections and which no man can even examine because they 
cannot be handled, because they cannot even be classi- 
fied, because they cannot be visible before the student— 
those evidences of the life of the globe which it is in- 
dispensable that man should explore if he would under- 
stand the life of man and the progress of medical sci- 
ence. 

These are the things which we dreamed of in our vi- 
sion; and do we think of these things simply to enhance 
the charm of the place, simply to give ourselves new 
quadrangles and better and larger architecture, simply to 
make some man’s artistic fortune by saying, ‘Here is a 
place in which you can conceive the most complete and 
systematic body of buildings that can be erected any- 
where in the United States’? Is this merely to please 
ourselves by adorning the place which we love? No. 
I take this dream to have this at its center: That we 


COLLEGE AND STATE 467 


want to transform thoughtless boys performing tasks 
into thinking men. ‘The trouble, gentlemen, with the 
modern undergraduate is that though a lovable boy he 
is a thoughtless boy. He is a boy who does his tasks 
sometimes because merely it is honorable for him to do 
his tasks; generally because it is compulsory to do 
his tasks; because he wants something which when he 
does his tasks that way really counts for nothing essen- 
tial at all, he wants a paltry piece of parchment; he 
wants not to have the disgrace of saying that he did not 
graduate, but he is graduated when the end comes upon 
no scale of endeavor, he is graduated upon no scale of 
achievement, he is graduated upon a scale of residence. 

We have heard a great deal about shortening the 
college course, and a great many persons have talked 
as if all that you had to judge of when you try to an- 
swer the question ‘“‘When should a man graduate?” was 
how many times has he attended class. I have heard a 
great many discussions of this course which puzzled 
my non-mathematical head, because they said that it was 
necessary in order that a man should graduate that he 
should have in the aggregate attended sixty exercises 
per week. It makes you dizzy to think about it. They 
did not require that he should attend all sixty in any 
one week; he can spread these, if he has breadth enough, 
over three years, if he has not breadth enough for that 
he can spread them over four, if he chooses to be a gen- 
tleman of leisure he can spread them over five. But 
when he has sixty hours a week to his credit, why then 
he can graduate. What hours they apparently have 
to attend is for these gentlemen a matter of indiffer- 
ence; they simply want to reckon up so many Pharisaical 
performances of a certain definite requirement and 
then these self-righteous gentlemen are ready to gradu- 
ate. It makes a great deal of difference, gentlemen, to 
a university whether it turns out thinking men or not. 
It does not make very much difference whether it turns 
out men who have attended lectures or not. (Applause.) 


468 COLLEGE AND STATE 


It would be a very nice test of university lecturers if 
the attendance were made optional; if a man had some- 
thing to say the men would go and if he didn’t have 
anything to say the men would not go. I believe in my 
heart that any man who has something to say can get 
an audience; it may not be the same audience every 
day, but if he has something to put into the thought of 
the campus and the talk of the campus somebody will 
be there to hear him lecture, and if he has not some- 
thing to contribute to the talk and the thought of the 
campus, ought anybody to be there to hear him lecture? 
That is a nice question which I should not like to press 
too far. 

Now, gentlemen, I do not believe that a man ought 
to work all the time. (Many voices: Right! Good!) 
I knew that would be a popular sentiment. I believe 
that the Constitution of the United States guarantees 
to a man a certain amount of loafing; otherwise it would 
come under the head of cruel and unusual punishments. 
I am not going to propose that we compel the under- 
graduates to work all the time, but I am going to pro- 
pose that we make the undergraduates want to work 
all the time. (Applause.) And there is a way to do 
that. There is a way which I believe an infallible way. 
Mind you, there is no study in the curriculum of a uni- 
versity which is not of itself intrinsically interesting. 
There are no minds in a university to which some sub- 
jects in that university may not be made to seem inter- 
esting, and the only way I know of to make a man see 
that a subject is interesting is to get him on the inside 
of it, and the only way to get him on the inside of it 
is to throw him on his own resources in becoming ac- 
quainted with it. I believe that there has to come in 
this country a radical change in our conception of an 
education, and I believe that it must come in this way: 
That we shall give up the schoolboy idea that men 
are to be examined upon lectures and upon text-books, 
and come to the grown-up idea that men are to be ex- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 469 


amined on subjects. Let me take a concrete example, 
because I want to get into this thing. I want to be 
able to say, for example, to the undergraduates who 
choose that line of study, ‘‘You will at a certain date, 
which may turn out for you to be a fateful date, be ex- 
amined on the subject of the constitutional history of 
the United States. Now you can get up that subject in 
ways which we will point out to you, or you can get 
up that subject in ways which you may discover for 
yourself, but if you don’t get up that subject, we shall 
have the pain of parting company with you. We are 
not going to examine you upon what the lecturer in 
American constitutional history said, we are not going 
to examine you in the particular text-books which he 
put in the catalogue as associated with his lectures; you 
can get up your history of America in that way or in 
some other way, but get up the history of America you 
must.” That makes a man of him, and it makes a man 
of him for this reason, that no man is a man who re- 
ceives his knowledge by instruction from somebody else; 
that a man is a man who receives his instruction by his 
own efforts and inquiries. 

Now there is a way to do that, gentlemen. There are 
different sorts of subjects in a curriculum, let me remind 
you; there are drill subjects, which I suppose are mild 
forms of torture, but to which every man must submit. 
So far as my own experience is concerned, the natural 
carnal man never desires to learn mathematics. We 
know by a knowledge of the history of the race that 
it is necessary by painful processes of drill to insert 
mathematics into a man’s constitution; he cannot be left 
to get up mathematics for himself because he cannot do 
it. There are some drill subjects which are just as nec- 
essary as the measles in order to make a man a grown-up 
person; he must have gone through those things in order 
to qualify himself for the experiences of life; he must 
have crucified his will and got up things which he did 
not intend to get up and reluctantly was compelled to 


470 COLLEGE AND STATE 


get up. That I believe is necessary for the salvation 
of his soul. But there are other subjects, those subjects 
which are out of the field of the ordinary school curricu- 
lum and which I may perhaps be permitted to say are 
more characteristic in their kind of the university study. 
They are what I call the reading subjects, like philoso- 
phy, like literature, like law, like history. In those 
subjects it is futile to try to instruct men by mere class- 
room methods. ‘The only way to instruct them is to pro- 
vide a certain number of men sufficiently qualified as in- 
structors, as scholars, who will be the companions and 
coaches and guides of the men’s reading, just as if we 
supplied the university with a score or more, with fifty 
or more, reference librarians, to say “If you want to 
get up such and such a subject here is the central and 
most authoritative literature on that subject, these are 
the books to read. If there are hard places in them 
we will explain them, if you lose your compass in the 
journey we will find your whereabouts again. You may 
report to us from time to time, you may consort with 
us every evening, we are your companions and coaches 
in the business, we are at your service.” 

Just so soon as you do that you get men inside the 
subjects that they are seeking to get up, and until you 
do that you cannot get them inside the subjects they 
are trying to get up. That, you will say, is the English 
tutorial system. Yes, but the English make an old- 
fashioned mistake about it; they appoint their tutors 
for life and their tutors go to seed. No man can do that 
sort of thing for youngsters without getting tired of it. 
Now that is the truth of the matter. It makes it nec- 
essary that he should always be understanding the diff- 
culties of beginners, and after awhile, ceasing to be a 
beginner himself, the thing becomes intolerable to him. 
He wants to go on about the independent research for 
which his beginnings have made him fit, and, therefore, 
I do not believe you could afford to keep an ordinary 
tutor for more than five years at that particular job. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 471 


I said this same thing in Chicago the other night and 
a newspaper reported that I said that no man ought to 
be a professor for more than five years. I did not say 
any such revolutionary thing as that. I said that no 
man ought to have this sort of a job for more than 
five years at a time. 

Gentlemen, if we could get a body of such tutors 
at Princeton we could transform the place from a place 
where there are youngsters doing tasks to a place where 
there are men doing thinking, men who are conversing 
about the things of thought, men who are eager and in- 
terested in the things of thought; we know that, because 
we have done it on a small scale. Wherever you have a 
small class and they can be intimately associated with 
their chief in the study of an interesting subject they 
catch the infection of the subject; but where they are in 
big classes and simply hear a man lecture two or three 
times a week, they cannot catch the infection of any- 
thing, except it may be the voice and enthusiasm of the 
lecturer himself. ‘This is the way in which to transform 
the place. 

All of that, gentlemen, .costs money. Now I am com- 
ing to business. To start that particular thing fairly 
and properly would need two millions and a quarter. 
(Whistles from the audience). I hope you will get 
your whistling over, because you will have to get used 
to this, and you may thank your stars I did not say 
four millions and a quarter, because we are going to 
get it. (Applause). I suspect there are gentlemen in 
this room who are going to give me two millions and a 
quarter to get rid of me. They will be able to get rid 
of me in no other way that I know of. And then, gentle- 
men, in order to do these other things which I have 
dreamed of, we shall need a great deal more than 
two millions and a quarter. I have not guessed at any 
figure that I have uttered. I have calculated upon a 
basis that I think in business would be recognized as a 
sound basis, every cent that I have estimated that Prince- 


472 COLLEGE AND STATE 


ton will need, and the total is twelve millions and a 
half. (Applause.) And what I want to say first of all 
about that sum of money is this, there is not any other 
university in the world that could make so small a sum 
go so far. There is not another university in the world 
that could transmute twelve millions and a half into 
red blood. 

Now why do all of this? Why not be satisfied with 
the happy life at Princeton? Why not congratulate our- 
selves upon the comradeship of a scene like this, and say, 
“This is enough, what could the heart of man desire 
more?’ Because, gentlemen, what this country needs is 
not more good fellowship; what this country needs now 
more than it ever did before, what it shall need in the 
years following, is knowledge and enlightenment. Civil- 
ization grows infinitely complex about us; the tasks of 
this country are no longer simple; men are not doing 
their duty who have a chance to know and do not equip 
themselves with knowledge in the midst of the tasks 
which surround us. Princeton has ever since her birth- 
day stood for the service of the nation. 

I have heard and my heart has echoed all the fine 
cheers of loyalty that have gone up for Princeton in 
this place and in other places, and no man who hears 
those cheers can doubt the genuineness of the impulse 
that is behind them. But, gentlemen, cheers and good 
wishes will not make the fortunes of Princeton; these 
things will not give Princeton reputation; nothing will 
give Princeton reputation except the achievements of 
the men whom she creates. The reputation of a univer- 
sity is not a matter of report. It is a matter of fact. 
You know that we hear a great deal of sentimental 
cant nowadays about cultivating our characters. God 
forbid that any man should spend his days thinking 
about his own character. What he wants to do is to 
get out and accomplish something, achieve something 
that is honorable, something that leaves the world a 
little nearer to the ideals that men have at their hearts, 


COLLEGE AND STATE 473 


and his character will take care of itself. Your char- 
acters, gentlemen, are by-products and the minute you 
set yourselves to produce them you make prigs of your- 
selves and render yourselves useless: I should despair 
of producing a character for Princeton by praising her. 
We are here to praise Princeton by serving our day and 
generation, by having some vision of the mind which 
we got in the comradeships of that place; and then these 
comradeships will mean for this country that which 
will assure her future. A body of men like this can in 
a day of crisis save the country they live in if they have 
purged their hearts and rectified their ways of thinking. 

This is the vision which we all have and when we have 
completed the task that is before us, as we shall com- 
plete it, as far as any one generation can complete what 
must go on forever, then every man who has scholar- 
ship and public service at heart, will feel that he must go 
first or last to worship at the same shrine with us. 
(Applause. ) 


THE YOUNG PEOPLE AND THE CHURCH 


AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE FORTIETH ANNUAL 
CONVENTION OF THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE SAB- 
BATH SCHOOL ASSOCIATION, AT PITTSBURGH, OCTO- 
BER 13, 1904. COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY THE SUNDAY 
SCHOOL TIMES COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA, PA. 


We bear a relationship to the rising generation 
whether we will or not. It is one of the principal 
tasks of each generation of mature persons in this world 
to hand on the work of the world to the next generation. 
We are engaged even more than we are aware in mold- 
ing young people to be like ourselves. Those who have 
read that delightful book of Kenneth Grahame’s en- 
titled ‘““[The Golden Age,” the age of childhood, will 
recall the indictment which he brings against the Olym- 
pians, as he calls them,—the grown-up people,—who do 
not understand the feelings of little folks not only, but 
do not seem to understand anything very clearly; who do 
not seem to live in the same world, who are constantly 
forcing upon the young ones standards and notions 
which they cannot understand, which they instinctively 
reject. They live in a world of delightful imagination; 
they pursue persons and objects that never existed; they 
make an Argosy laden with gold out of a floating butter- 
fly,—and these stupid Olympians try to translate these 
things into uninteresting facts. 

I suppose that nothing is more painful in the recollec- 
tions of some of us than the efforts that were made to 
make us like grown-up people. ‘The delightful follies 
that we had to eschew, the delicious nonsense that we 
had to disbelieve, the number of odious prudences that 
we had to learn, the knowledge that though the truth 

474 


COLLEGE AND STATE 475 


was less interesting than fiction, it was more important 
than fiction,—the fact that what people told you could 
not always be relied on, and that it must be tested by the 
most uninteresting tests. 

When you think of it, we are engaged in the some- 
what questionable practise of making all the world 
uniform. We should be very sure that we are very 
handsome characters to have a full heart in the under- 
taking of making youngsters exactly like ourselves. 
There is an amount of aggregate vanity in the process 
which it is impossible to estimate. Moreover, you will 
notice that there are very whimsical standards in this 
world. We speak of some persons as being normal, 
and of others as being abnormal. By normal we mean 
like ourselves; by abnormal we mean unlike ourselves. 
The abnormal persons are in the minority, and there- 
fore most of them are in the asylum. If they got to be 
in the majority, we would go to the asylum. If we 
departed from that law of the Medes and Persians 
which commands us to be like other persons, we would 
be in danger of the bars. ‘The only thing that saves us 
is that abnormal people are not all alike. If they were, 
they might be shrewd enough to get the better of us, 
and put us where we put them. 

And we are engaged in rubbing off the differences. 
We desire not to be supposed to be unlike other per- 
sons; we would prefer to abjure our individuality, and 
to say, as Dean Swift advised every man to say who 
desired to be considered wise, ‘‘My dear sir, I am exactly 
of your opinion.” We try to avoid collisions of indi- 
viduality, and go about to tell the younger people that 
they must do things as we have always done them, and 
as our parents made us do them, or else they will lose 
caste in the world. 

There are two means by which we carry on this inter- 
esting work of making the next generation like the last. 
There is life itself, and that is the most drastic school 
there is. There is no school so hard in its lessons as the 


476 COLLEGE AND STATE 


school of life. You are not excused from any one of its 
exercises. You are not excused for mistakes in any 
one of its lessons. We say a great many things that are 
harsh, and deservedly harsh, I will admit, about college 
hazing; but there is a more subtle hazing than that. 
The world hazes the persons that will not conform. 
It hazes after a manner that is worse than hazing their 
bodies,—it hazes their spirits, and teases them with the 
pointed finger and the curl of the lip, and says, ‘“That 
man thinks he knows the whole thing.” ‘That, I say, 
is a very much more refined torture than making a man 
do a great many ridiculous things for the purpose of 
realizing that he is ridiculous, and so getting out of 
conceit with himself. I do not believe in hazing, but I 
do believe that there are some things worse than hazing. 
And I have suffered worse things from my fellow-men 
since I got out of college than I suffered while I was 
in college. 

Life is a terrible master to those who cannot escape 
its more trying processes. ‘The little urchin in the slums 
of the city knows more of the prudences of life when he 
is five than most of us knew at five and twenty. He 
knows just how hard a school he lives in, and just how 
astute he must be to win any of its prizes, to win even 
the tolerance of the powers that conduct it, even to 
live from day to day. He knows how many cars of 
Juggernaut must be dodged on the streets for the mere 
leave to live, and the keenness of his senses, his shrewd- 
ness in a bargain, is such as would predict him a man 
successful in commerce, would mean that some day he 
was going to overreach his fellow-man as now life seems 
to be overreaching him, and imposing upon him, and 
snatching every coveted thing from his grasp. The 
process of culture, the process of civilization, and the 
processes that can be bought by wealth, are largely 
processes of exemption from the harder classes of the 
school of life. Some young gentlemen brought up in 
the lap of luxury seem to have escaped all lessons, seem 


COLLEGE AND STATE 477 


to know just as little about the world as it is possible 
for a person to live nineteen years and know. I have 
sometimes thought that if we could get a whole college 
of youngsters who had spent their boyhood in the slums, 
where they had to have wits in order to live, we would 
make extraordinary progress in scholarship; whereas, 
when in our discouraged moments,—I mean discouraged 
moments in our teaching,—we take some grim comfort 
in saying, as a Yale friend of mine said, that after teach- 
ing twenty years he had come to the conclusion that the 
human mind had infinite resources for resisting the in- 
troduction of knowledge. But you cannot resist the 
introduction of the knowledge that life brings. Life 
brings it and unloads it in your lap whether you want 
it or not. 

The other means we have of indoctrinating the next 
generation and making the world uniform is organiza- 
tion. The individual process is not enough, we think, 
the process of working upon each other individually so 
that a miscellaneous set of influences prick each of us 
like so many currents of electricity. We think we must 
organize as a body to have a given, definite, predeter- 
mined effect upon others. So we take unfair advan- 
tage of a youngster in organizing a whole school so 
that he cannot escape having certain impressions made 
upon him. We tax the public in order to pay for the 
schools which will make it impossible for him to escape. 
And there are various instrumentalities which are or- 
ganic. In the first place, there is the home; then there 
is the school; then there is the church; then there are 
all the political means, the means which we call social 
in their character, by which to mold and control the ris- 
ing generation. All of these have their part in control- 
ling the youth of the country and making them what we 
deem it necessary that they should be. 

What do we wish that they should be? If forced to 
reason about it, we say they ought to be what we have 
found by experience it is prudent and wise to be; and 


478 COLLEGE AND STATE 


they ought to be something more,—they ought to go 
one stage beyond the stage we have gone. But we 
cannot conduct them beyond the stage we have reached. 
We can only point and say, ‘‘Here are the boundaries 
which we have reached; beyond is an undiscovered 
country; go out and discover it. We can furnish you 
with a few probabilities; we can supply you with a few 
tendencies; we can say to you that we think that wisdom 
points in this direction; but we cannot go with you; we 
cannot guide you; we must part with you at the opening 
of the door, and bid you Godspeed. But we want you 
to go on; we do not want you to stop where we 
stopped.” 

What capital, after all, is it that we supply them 
with? I take it that knowledge is a pretty poor com- 
modity in itself and by itself. A ship does not sail be- 
cause of her cargo. ‘There is no propulsion in that. 
If the captain did not know his port, if he did not know 
his rules of navigation, if he did not know the manage- 
ment of his engines, or have somebody aboard who did, 
if he did not know all the powers that will carry the 
ship to the place where her cargo will have additional 
value, the cargo would be nothing to him. What is his 
purpose? His purpose is that the cargo should be 
used. Used for what? For the convenience or the 
enlightenment, whatever it may be, of the people to 
whom he is carrying it. 

And so with knowledge. The knowledge you supply 
to the little fellow in the home is not merely conveyed to 
him in order that he may be full; the knowledge that is 
supplied to him in school is not put in him as if he 
were merely a little vessel to be filled to the top. My 
father, who was a very plain-spoken man, used to use 
a phrase which was rough, but it expressed the meaning 
exactly. He said, ‘‘My son, the mind is not a prolix gut 
to be stuffed.’ That is not the object of it. It is not 
a vessel made to contain something; it is a vessel made 
to transmute something. The process of digestion is 


COLLEGE AND STATE 479 


of the essence, and the only part of the food that is 
of any consequence is the part that is turned into blood 
and fructifies the whole frame. And so with knowledge. 
All the wise saws and prudent maxims and pieces of in- 
formation that we supply to the generation coming on 
are of no consequence whatever in themselves unless 
they get into the blood and are transmuted. 

And how are you going to get these things into the 
blood? You know that nothing communicates fire ex- 
cept fire. In order to start a fire you must originate 
a fire. You must have a little spark in order to have 
a great blaze. I have often heard it said that a speaker 
is dry, or that a subject is dry. Well, there isn’t any 
subject in the world that is dry. It is the person that 
handles it and the person who receives it that are dry. 
The subject is fertile enough. But the trouble with 
most persons when they handle a subject is that they 
handle it as if it were a mere aggregate mass meant 
to stay where it is placed; whereas it is something to 
be absorbed into the pores, to have the life circulation 
communicated to it, and the moment you communicate 
that to it, it itself becomes a vehicle of life. Every one 
who touches a live thing knows he has touched living 
tissue, and not a dead hand. 

So that no knowledge is of any particular conse- 
quence in this world which is not incarnate. For ex- 
ample, we are taught the knowledge of the laws of 
hygiene, but what earthly good are the laws of hygiene 
to us if we do not live in obedience to them? Presently. 
disease springs upon us, and Nature says, ‘“Thou fool. 
You knew these things. What profit is it to you to 
know them and not to regard them in your way of life? 
They were never yours. They were never part of you. 
You never possessed them.” The moral of which is 
simply this, that the truths which are not translated 
into lives are dead truths, and not living truths. The 
only way to learn grammatical speech is to associate 
with those who speak grammatically. 


480 COLLEGE AND STATE 


And so of religion. Religion is communicable, I ver- 
ily believe, aside from the sacred operations of the Holy 
Spirit, only by example. You have only to ask yourself 
what is the effect of a profession of religion on the 
part of a man who does not live a religious life. You 
know that the effect is not only not to communicate 
religion, but to delay indefinitely its influence. It is cer- 
tainly true that we are not to judge religion by those 
who profess it but do not live it. But it is also true that 
if those who profess it are the only ones we live with, 
and they fail to live it, it cannot be communicated ex- 
cept by some mysterious grace of the Holy Spirit him- 
self. So that no amount of didactic teaching in a home 
whose life is not Christian will ever get into the con- 
sciousness and life of the children. If you wish your 
children to be Christians, you must really take the 
trouble to be Christians yourselves. Those are the only 
terms upon which the home will work the gracious 
miracle. 

And you cannot shift this thing by sending your 
children to Sunday-school. You may remedy many 
things, but you cannot shift this responsibility. If the 
children do not get this into their blood atmospheric- 
ally, they are not going to get it into their blood at 
all until, it may be, they come to a period of life where 
the influences of Christian lives outside of the home 
may profoundly affect them and govern their con- 
sciences. We must realize that the first and most in- 
timate and most important organization for the 
indoctrinating of the next generation is the home, is 
the family. This is the key to the whole situation. 
That is the reason that you must get hold of the whole 
family when you get hold of the children in your Sun- 
day-school work; that your work will not be half done 
when you merely get the children there, and it may be, 
their mothers. You must include the fathers, and get 
your grip upon the home organization in such wise that 


COLLEGE AND STATE 481 


the children will have the atmospheric pressure of Chris- 
tianity the week through. 

We are constantly debating and hearing it debated, 
How will the church get hold of the young people? 
You cannot answer that question unless you have a 
philosophy of the matter. And it seems to me that 
the inevitable philosophy of the matter is this: There 
are only a certain number of things that impress young 
persons, only a certain number that impress old ones, 
or, for that matter that impress anybody. The things 
that impress the young person and the old are convic- 
tions and earnestness in action that looks like business, 
and a certain dignity and simplicity that go along with 
being in earnest. You will notice that when a man is 
going about his business he does not study his gestures, 
he does not consider his poses, he does not think how 
he looks when he is sitting at his desk in his chair. There 
is a directness and simplicity of approach in the thing 
which shows an utter lack of self-consciousness. He is 
not thinking about the machinery by which he is acting; 
he is after the thing. 

When we say, therefore, that the way to get young 
people to the church is to make the church interesting, 
I am afraid we too often mean that the way to do is 
to make it entertaining. Did you ever know the thea- 
ter to be a successful means of governing conduct? Did 
you ever know the most excellent concert, or series of 
concerts, to be the means of revolutionizing a life? 
Did you ever know any amount of entertainment to go 
further than hold for the hour that it lasted? If you 
mean to draw young people by entertainment, you 
have only one excuse for it, and that is to follow up 
the entertainment with something that is not entertain- 
ing, but which grips the heart like the touch of a hand. 
I dare say that there is some excuse for alluring per- 
sons to a place where good will be done them, but I 
think it would be a good deal franker not to allure 
them. I think it would be a great deal better simply 


482 COLLEGE AND STATE 


to let them understand that that is the place where life 
is dispensed, and that if they want life they must come 
to that place. 

If they believe that you believe what you say, they 
will come. If they have the least suspicion that you 
do not believe it, if they have the least suspicion that 
you are simply playing a game of social organization, 
if they have the notion that you are simply organizing 
a very useful instrumentality of society for moralizing 
the community, but that you don’t after all believe that 
life itself lies in the doctrine and preaching of that place 
and nowhere else, you cannot keep hold of them very 
long. The only thing that governs any of us is au- 
thority. And the reason that it is harder to govern us 
when we are grown up than when we are young is that 
we question the authority, and you have to convince our 
minds of the reasonableness of the authority. But the 
young mind yields to the authority that believes in itself. 
That is the reason that consistency of conduct is indis- 
pensable to the maintenance of authority. You cannot 
make the young person do what you do not do your- 
self. You cannot make him believe what vou do not 
belteve yourself. 

I have known some parents who had very deep doubt 
about some of the deeper mysteries of revelation, but 
who, nevertheless, tried to communicate those deep 
mysteries to their children, with an absolute lack of 
success that was to have been expected. ‘They did not 
believe them themselves. Did you never have the 
uneasy experience of going into the presence of a child 
who did not care to speak to you? There are two be- 
ings who assess character instantly by looking into the 
eyes,—dogs and children. If a dog not naturally pos- 
sessed of the devil will not come to you after he has 
looked you in the face, you ought to go home and 
examine your conscience; and if a little child, from 
any other reason than mere timidity, looks you in the 
face, and then draws back and will not come to your 


COLLEGE AND STATE 483 


knee, go home and look deeper yet into your conscience. 
There is no eye so searching as the eye of simplicity. 
And you might as well give up the attempt of trying 
to wear a mask before children, particularly the mask 
that you are so desirous of wearing,—the mask of 
hypocrisy. It does not work, and it is a very fortunate 
thing that it does not work. If it did, we would make 
our children as big hypocrites as we are. You must 
believe the things you tell the children. 

Have you not seen the flicker of the child’s eye when 
he first asked you if there was really any Santa Claus, 
and you told him yes? He knows something is the 
matter. He may not be shrewd enough or thoughtful 
enough to know what is the matter, but after that he 
has his doubts about Santa Claus, simply because, by 
some electric communication that you cannot stop, your 
doubts about Santa Claus have been communicated to 
him. If you are a positivist, he will be a positivist; if 
you believe, he will believe. 

It is all in the atmosphere. Sometimes it seems to 
me that nine-tenths of what we give other persons is 
in our personality. The value of one man contrasted 
with another is that some men have no electricity in 
them. They might be in the room or out of the room; 
it doesn’t make any difference. Other men come into 
the room, and the moment they come into it something 
happens, either attraction or repulsion. I cannot sit in 
a railroad station comfortably, because men will come 
in whom I want to kick out, and persons will come in 
whom I want to go up and speak to, and make friends 
with, and I am restrained because when I was small I 
was told that was not good form, and I would not for 
the world be unlike my fellow-men. So I sit still and 
try to think about something else, and my eye constantly 
wanders to some person whom it would, I am sure, be 
such fun to go and talk to, who I know has something 
I would like to have. And yet, as for nine-tenths of the 
persons in the room, they do nothing but vitiate the 


484 COLLEGE AND STATE 


atmosphere, and you would rather have their breathing 
room than their presence. 

And it is thus all through life. A man comes to you 
to press a piece of business upon you, and he goes 
away, and you say to yourself, ‘‘No, I won't go into 
that.”’ 

And some one else says, ‘‘Why not? Don’t you be- 
lieve in him?” 

“No, I don’t believe in him.” 

**“Do you know anything wrong that he ever did?” 

“Noo? 

“Didn’t he verify his statements ?”’ 

Vest 

“Then why don’t you go in with him?” 

“Well, I don’t know. I won't do it. I don’t like 
his looks. There was something about him that made 
me think it was not all straight, and, at any rate, I will 
look into it, and hear about it from somebody else 
before going any further.” 

We are constantly having that feeling. And that 
is the feeling which illustrates my thought, though I 
have gone pretty far afield to illustrate it,—that it is 
conviction, authority, simplicity, the directness of one 
who is going about his business, and goes about it with 
genuineness, which governs young people. The moral 
of that is, that you are going the wrong way about ac- 
complishing what you seek when you try to make that 
entertaining which, in the nature of things, though en- 
grossing, is not entertaining in the ordinary sense of 
the word. 

To tell a human being of the things that affect his 
eternal salvation I should say is decidedly under- 
described if you call it entertaining. It is not enter- 
taining in any reasonable sense of the word to tell him 
of the things that most profoundly affect his welfare 
in this world and in the next. I know that there are 
ways of telling men the truth which repel them; I know 
that too many men are tried for by efforts which merely 


COLLEGE AND STATE 485 


frighten. I believe that too much effort is made to get 
people to believe for fear of the consequences of unbe- 
lief. I don’t believe any man was ever drawn into 
heaven for fear he would go to hell. Because, if I 
understand the Scriptures in the least, they speak a 
gospel of love. Except God draw you, you are not 
drawn. You are not brought in by whips, you are not 
drawn by a frowning face, you are not drawn by a 
threatening gesture. You are drawn by love, you are 
drawn by the knowledge that if you come you will be 
received as a son. Nothing but yearning draws you. 
Fear never drew you anywhere. 

You must realize that it is all a question of personal 
relationship between man and his Maker, and a personal 
relationship founded upon love. For love is the only 
thing that I know that ever led to self-abnegation. 
Ambition does not lead to it; no use of power for 
power’s sake leads to anything but self-aggrandizement. 
Can you name me any motive in the world that ever 
led a man to love another life more than his own except 
the motive of love? And yet what we are working for 
in the young people, as in the old, is to show them the 
perfect image of a Man who will draw all the best 
powers of their nature to Himself, and make them 
love him so that they will love him more than they love 
themselves, and loving him so, will love their fellow-men 
more than they love themselves. Everything heroic, 
everything that looks toward salvation, is due to this 
power of elevation. It is a noteworthy thing that we 
reserve the beautiful adjective ‘‘noble” for the men who 
think less of themselves than of some cause or of some 
person whom they serve. We elevate to the only nobil- 
ity we have, the nobility of moral greatness, only those 
men who are governed by love. 

You cannot create love by entertainment, but you can 
make love by the perfect exhibition of Christ-like qual- 
ities, and, with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, by the 
withdrawal of the veil which for most men hangs before 


486 COLLEGE AND STATE 


the face of our Lord and Saviour. Our whole object, 
it seems to me, in church work is simply this: to enable 
all to see him, to realize him, and if we devote our- 
selves to that purpose with singleness of heart and with- 
out thought of ourselves, we shall suddenly find the 
seats filling, because where there is fire thither men will 
carry their lamps to be lighted. Where there is power, 
men will go to partake of it. Every human soul in- 
stinctively feels that the only power he desires, the only 
power that can relieve him from the tedium of the day’s 
work, the only thing which can put a glow upon the 
routine of the day’s task, the only thing that can take 
him back to the golden age when everything had a 
touch of magic about it, when everything was greater 
than the fact, when everything had lurking behind it 
some mysterious power, when there was in everything 
a vision and a perfect image,—is this thing which he 
sees enthroned upon the shining countenances of those 
who really believe in the life and saving grace of their 
Lord and Master. 


THE PRINCETON PRECEPTORIAL SYSTEM. 


FROM THE “INDEPENDENT,” VOL. LIX, PP. 239-240, 
AUGUST 3, 1905. 


d Cesare system of preceptorial instruction which we are 

about to elaborate at Princeton is no new or novel 
notion of our own, but based upon almost universal 
experience, upon what every teacher must have found 
out for himself, whether by way of interpreting his 
failures or of interpreting his successes; he always gets 
his best results by direct, personal, intimate intercourse 
with his pupils, not as a class but as individuals. 

College instructors have long observed that their 
teaching is rendered more effective by dividing large 
classes into small sections and making each section small 
enough to enable them to get frequently at each mem- 
ber of the class in the process of test and drill. But 
even this division of large classes into small sections 
has not been satisfactory. The sections were usually 
made up either alphabetically or according to marks or 
grades received by members of the class in written tests 
or examinations on the subjects they were studying, the 
best students being put in one section, the next best in 
the next, and so on to the dullest in the lowest section. 
Now, it so happens that God has not classified men’s 
abilities either alphabetically or according to their per- 
formances in examinations. I need not urge that he 
has not used the alphabet; neither will it require much 
argument to prove to experienced teachers that he has 
not adjusted gifts to the processes of examination. It 
by no means always turns out that the men who have 
got themselves by examination into the first section of 
the class are the brightest men in the class, or that those 

487 


488 COLLEGE AND STATE 


who allow themselves to fall into the lowest section 
are the dullest. The lowest division, in fact, often 
contains the greatest variety: very bright men, who 
will not use their gifts in their studies; very dull men, 
who have no gifts to use, and mediocre men, who are 
lazy. Separating the class into sections in either of the 
two ways most commonly employed is certainly a way 
of dividing it, but it is not an intelligent way of classify- 
ing the individuals who compose it. ‘The intention of 
the preceptorial system is to enable the instructors to 
handle the men assigned them either singly or in classi- 
fied groups, in which men of like training, aptitudes 
and needs are united. 

But the system involves much more than a change of 
method. It is meant not only, in time, to supersede 
entirely the old-fashioned “‘recitation,”’ but also to affect 
very materially the subject matter of study, to give the 
undergraduates their proper release from being school- 
boys, to introduce them to the privileges of maturity 
and independence by putting them in the way of doing 
their own reading instead of “getting up” lectures or 
“lessons.” The subject matter of their studies is not 
to be the lectures of their professors or the handful 
of text-books, the narrow round of technical exercises 
set for them under the ordinary methods, but the read- 
ing which they should do for themselves in order to get 
a real first-hand command of the leading ideas, principles 
and processes of the subjects which they are studying. 
Their exercises with their preceptors are not to be reci- 
tations, but conferences, in which, by means of any 
method of report or discussion that may prove service- 
able and satisfactory, the preceptors may test, guide 
and stimulate their reading. The governing idea is to 
be that they are getting up subjects—getting them up 
with the assistance of lecturers, libraries and a body of 
preceptors who are their guides, philosophers and 
friends. The process is intended to be one of reading, 


COLLEGE AND STATE 489 


comparing, reflecting; not cramming, but daily method- 
ical study. 

One great incidental advantage is expected to accrue 
to the study of English. The reports of the undergrad- 
uates to the preceptors on the reading they are doing 
will naturally very often be written reports, and it is to 
be expected that all such reports will be judged of as 
English as well as with regard to the accuracy or inac- 
curacy of their subject-matter. If not written in good 
English, they will have to be written over again, and 
if it turns out that any man cannot use his mother tongue 
correctly and with some degree of elegance, upon being 
so corrected and held to a standard of expression, he 
is to be handed over to the English department for fun- 
damental training. The constant daily necessity to know 
his own language and to use it properly upon all sorts 
of subjects will certainly be the most vital system of 
‘theme writing’? yet devised, and may be expected to 
have a quality of reality about it which the formal writ- 
ten exercises of English departments have generally 
lacked. The men will be using their mother tongue in 
careful writing, not for the sake of the language itself, 
but for the sake of releasing ideas and stating facts. 
Style will be a means and not an end; and it should never 
in any kind of writing be anything else. 

In brief, the system will be a method of study, a means 
of familiarizing the undergraduate with the chief au- 
thorities, conceptions and orders of work in his fields of 
study. The preceptors will not set the examinations. 
That would turn them into mere coaches, coaching for 
final tests which they themselves were to set. They are, 
rather, to be fellow-students, expositors, advisers, to 
see that the right work is done by themselves taking 
part in it. 

They will not, however, be a body of men segregated 
and set apart from the general body of the faculty. The 
present staff of the university will also do preceptorial 
work; the new preceptors will take some part in the 


490 COLLEGE AND STATE 


lecture and regular class work, which will still go for- 
ward; they will be members of the faculty, indistinguish- 
able in privilege and rank from their colleagues. The 
fundamental object of the system would be defeated if 
any sharp line of division were drawn in the faculty 
between the several kinds of teachers, for the funda- 
mental object is to draw faculty and undergraduates 
together into a common body of students, old and young, 
among whom a real community of interest, pursuit and 
feeling will prevail. The preceptors will only have more 
conference work to do than their colleagues. It will 
be their chief, if not their distinctive, function to devote 
their energies to the intimate work of counsel and guid- 
ance I have tried to characterize and describe. 

It is our confident hope that such changes will bring 
about very gratifying results: that the undergraduate 
will take more pleasure in his studies, derive more profit 
and stimulation from them, and that the instructor will 
find vital intercourse with his pupils give place to dull 
routine. There will be more work done, but it will be 
less burdensome both to teacher and pupil, more normal, 
less like a body of tasks and more like a natural enjoy- 
ment of science and letters. 


THE PRECEPTORIAL SYSTEM. 


ADDRESS BEFORE THE WESTERN ASSOCIATION OF PRINCE- 
TON CLUBS AT CLEVELAND, OHIO, MAY Ig, 1906. 
FROM THE “PRINCETON ALUMNI WEEKLY,” JUNE 
2, 1906, VOL. VI, PP. 651-655. 


M® TOASTMASTER and gentlemen: I am always 
at a loss to determine whether I would rather 
come at the beginning of a list of speakers, or at the end. 
At the beginning I have no speech to make but my own; 
at the end I may have gathered a number of suggestions 
from the speakers who have already spoken. You are 
at my mercy if I come first, because I can do nothing 
but deliver you my well-known speech. 

I always feel, upon an occasion like this, that I am 
a responsible minister reporting to his constituents. And 
I think that Professor West will bear me out in saying 
that the report of the present year, now about con- 
cluded, is in every way very satisfactory. I do not know 
that it is particularly satisfactory to the eighty men 
who were dropped at the mid-year examinations; but I 
think that all of them are coming back next year, and 
will probably regard themselves as able to report prog- 
ress at that time. I do know that the new spirit of 
study which has come upon Princeton would surprise 
some of you. (Laughter and applause.) About this 
table I recognize the faces of some who were ingenious 
in resisting the processes of learning—and if they have 
applied as much ingenuity to their business as they did 
then to their pleasure, I congratulate them upon their 
success. One of the undergraduates the other day said, 
in a tone of great condemnation, that Princeton was not 
the place it used to be—that men were actually talking 


491 


492 COLLEGE AND STATE 


about their studies at the clubs. He evidently regretted 
that as an invasion of the privileges of undergraduate 
life. But the beauty of the situation is that the studies 
of the University are becoming, I will not be so bold as 
to say they have already become, a part of the life of 
the University, and for my part I don’t care a pepper- 
corn for studies which do not constitute a part of the 
life of the men who are pursuing them. (Applause.) 
I believe that there has been in all our universities in 
years past too much of the spirit of schoolboys; not 
because the men there were not often really interested 
in their studies, but because the processes of the Uni- 
versity kept them schoolboys in their attitude toward 
their studies; now at Princeton they are beginning to 
feel that they are coming into the privileges of man- 
hood. | 

You have heard a great deal, I dare say, first and last, 
about the Preceptorial System, and most of it has been 
from the old point of view, namely, that it brought the 
teacher into personal and intimate contact with the 
pupil. But the point I would dwell upon is that the 
relationship is not so exclusively that of pupil and 
teacher as it used to be; that the new thing we are 
introducing is the independent pursuit of certain studies 
by men old enough to study for themselves and accorded 
the privilege in their studies of having the counsel of 
scholars older than themselves. It is not merely that 
they are being led, but that they are becoming what 
every university student ought to be, namely, reading 
men. 

I have sometimes said to the men I knew best in the 
University that it did not make so very much difference 
with me what a man read, but it did not seem to me 
that any man had the title to call himself a university 
man who was not a reading man, who merely gathered 
the transitory impressions of the day in which he lived 
and did not put himself into the main currents of 
thought that flow out of the old centuries into the 


COLLEGE AND STATE 493 


new, that constitute the pulse and life of the race. Men 
are in universities in order to come into contact with the 
vital forces that have always beat through the centuries 
in making civilization and in making thought (ap- 
plause), and if they do not voluntarily put themselves 
into contact with those forces, those forces are of no 
avail to them. For what a man reluctantly receives he 
does not retain, and it does not constitute any part of 
his life. 

The thing which has pleased me most in regard to 
the Preceptorial System is not only the splendid fact 
that the alumni have given us the money to conduct the 
system, but the significant fact that the undergraduates 
have welcomed the change and have felt that it en- 
riched their own life. It would be a very petty life 
to live if we were merely schoolmasters; it would not 
interest me for twenty-four hours to be a taskmaster 
in respect to the studies of a lot of youngsters. Unless 
I can lead them to see the beauty of the things that have 
seemed beautiful to me, I have mistaken my profession. 
(Applause.) It is not the whip that makes men, but 
the lure of things that are worthy to be loved. (Ap- 
plause.) And so we feel that we are entitled to be full 
of hope in regard to the increasing intellectual life of 
Princeton. For, gentlemen, I am covetous for Prince- 
ton of all the glory that there is (applause), and the 
chief glory of a university is always intellectual glory. 
The chief glory of a university is the leadership of the 
nation in the things that attach to the highest ambitions 
that nations can set themselves, those ideals which 
lift nations into the atmosphere of things that are per- 
manent and do not fade from generation to generation. 
(Applause.) I do not see how any man can fail to per- 
ceive that scholarship, that education, in a country like 
ours, is a branch of statesmanship. It is a branch of 
that general work of enabling a great country to use its 
energies to the best advantage and to lift itself from 


494 COLLEGEVAND STATE 


generation to generation through stages of unbroken 
progress. 

When I look about upon the generation in which we 
live, I, like every man who looks with thoughtful eyes 
upon it, am very much sobered by what I see; not dis- 
concerted, not robbed of hope, not cooled even in my 
optimism, but nevertheless very much sobered by the 
seriousness of the task which confronts us. Every age 
is compounded of things old and new, and the men of 
middle age are more involved in the things that are 
old than are the men in the generation that is coming 
on. And I always think of the change that must con- 
stantly be expected in a complex age as residing more 
with the younger generation than with the generation 
that is actually in charge of affairs. I see these young 
men drawing on all the complicated skeins that make 
up the pattern of our modern life, modifying that pat- 
tern, renewing the stuff where it is old, changing, con- 
firming, doing all those things that draw on the forces 
of one age to be the forces of another. Because only 
they, when they are competent, can see the pattern as 
a whole. I believe that in spite of all the things which 
we deplore, and which bring the blood to our faces, 
there is a great deal that is splendid about the civiliza- 
tion of our day. ‘The things that have been done in 
this country by way of its material advancement could 
not have been done without great gifts, without great 
powers, individual and corporate. There is a sense 
in which the individual in the modern industrial world is 
necessarily greater, if he be noticeable at all, than the 
individual of any other generation. For no man can 
do anything in his generation by and of himself. He 
must rule his fellow-men and draw them into co6per- 
ation with himself, if he would accomplish anything. 
There is a touch of statesmanship about every piece of 
modern business, about every piece of modern engineer- 
ing. It is as if all the powers of the world were organ- 
ized and the captains of industry were making their way 


COLLEGE AND STATE 495 


forward in the ranks to be generals in command of the 
forces of mankind. ‘There is a great deal of planning 
and energy by which men have won their material su- 
premacy—as well as the other side of the picture, 
which for the present I do not care to draw. 

Now, young men coming with new forces into this 
complicated plot, have freer hands than other men in 
the generation, cleaner hands and freer hands than any- 
body else. And when one asks one’s self what sort of 
education these men should have in order to carry what 
will be the young man’s burden for many a day to come, 
it seems to me evident that the education they receive 
should not be such as to catch them at once in the web 
of the complicated interests which they must touch with- 
out prejudice and without favor. To put it in plainer, 
less abstract terms, if you merely train men for busi- 
ness, directly for business, they are immersed in the 
business, so far as their thoughts are concerned, through- 
out their education, and are committed to the prejudices 
of their occupations before even they enter upon them. 
(Applause.) You cannot train men for a particular 
business without filling their heads with the atmosphere 
of that business; and we want a great body of young 
men going into the active affairs of this world untouched 
by the atmosphere of any particular interest. We must 
in our processes of education, somewhere, put ourselves 
in a position to give young men a view of life which 
shall not be touched by the interests which will engross 
them when they seek to make their living. (Applause. ) 

For, gentlemen, there are many complications of hu- 
man motive. When we speak of a man’s making his 
living, we forget that he is also making somebody else’s 
living in nine cases out of ten. Many a man would draw 
out of the business he is in, when he saw it was touch- 
ing him with corruption, if it did not mean privation to 
a woman he loves, to children he loves; if it did not 
mean he was bringing upon others a kind of suffering 
and a sort of anxiety which he might be willing to bring 


496 COLLEGE AND STATE 


upon himself singly, but is not willing to bring upon 
them. If men acted singly and each for himself, the 
aspect of affairs would be very different; and many a 
man is debased by some of the noblest impulses of his 
nature, his love for those who are not concerned in 
the things which have involved him. Many a man would 
be morally independent if he were in fact independent, 
but he is carrying the fortunes of others. 

Look, therefore, how impossible it is for him to 
assess any problem in a disinterested fashion, if from 
the first he has been taught, in college as well as else- 
where, that the chief end of man is to make a living! 
If the chief end of man is to make a living, why, make 
a living any way youcan. But if it ever has been shown 
to him in some quiet place where he has been withdrawn 
from the interests of the world, that the chief end of 
man is to keep his soul untouched from corrupt influ- 
ences, and to see to it that his fellow-men hear the truth 
from his lips, he will never get that out of his con- 
sciousness again. There will always come up within him 
with a great resurgence, some way or other, those les- 
sons of his youth, and there will come a voice from the 
conscience which will arrest the very progress of a 
generation. But if you never teach him any ideal except 
the ideal of making a living, there will be no voice 
within him, he will know no other ideal. 

I believe, therefore, that there must be some univer- 
sities in this country which undertake to teach men the 
life that is in them, by teaching them the disinterested 
truths of pure science, by teaching them the truths of 
pure philosophy, and that literature which is the per- 
manent voice and song of the human spirit, letting them 
know that they are not going a lonesome journey, but 
that generations of men behind them are crying them 
on to do better things than they could otherwise even 
attempt, and that generations beyond them are beck- 
oning them on to a day of happier things. (Applause.) 
There must sound in the halls of the true university this 


COLLEGE AND STATE 497 


eternal voice of the human race that can never be 
drowned as long as men remember what the race has 
hoped and purposed. 

And so, gentlemen, the ideals that we talk about, the 
ideals that we try to translate into definite programmes 
of study, are not things which we can take or leave as 
we please, unless you believe that we can take or leave 
life itelf as we please. There is no choice in the matter. 
I am not daunted by the prediction that we are going 
to be submerged in waves of materialism, because any 
man who has read never so superficially the history of 
the race knows that there are certain things that cannot 
be absolutely submerged or crushed. If there remain 
any little band of men keeping the true university spirit 
alive, that band will, after a while, seem to be all that 
there is of a great nation, so far as the historian is con- 
cerned. 

It affords me very great satisfaction sometimes to see 
how certain public men are misjudged, and to know 
that quiet gentlemen, sitting in university chairs, will, 
when the noise of that generation is over, readjust the 
balance and tell future generations who were really 
the great men of that generation. (Applause.) We 
are the jury that sits last, and future generations will 
know from us alone who were the great men that were 
our contemporaries. ‘The noisy talk of the day will 
pass with the day itself, and then that eternal voice of 
literature will continue to sound, that voice which is 
purged of passion, which at any rate seeks to speak 
the thing which is just and true and of good repute. 

And so, our ambitions for a university which retains 
this spirit are not hopes so much as a definite confidence 
that certain things must come to pass. The best thing, 
to my thought, about what we call the Princeton spirit 
is the manliness and the unselfishness and the truthful- 
ness that there is in it. Why should any of you love 
Princeton? Because it is a beautiful place? Because 
the trees are beautiful to look upon in the spring? Be- 


498 COLLEGE AND STATE 


cause the sward is green and the buildings are hand- 
some? Are you in love with a physical image? Are 
you in love with a thing the life of which is all over for 
you, simply because you remember the good times you 
had in those pleasant places? Your love would die in 
you to-morrow, if you did not know that you got while 
in Princeton the thing which made you better citizens 
and better comrades and more honest and just men 
than if you hadn’t gone there. ‘That is what gives you 
the Princeton spirit, that is the reason that the Class of 
"41 is modern; that is the reason that there is no dif- 
ference whatever in the conception which Mr. Voorhees 
has and the conception which members of the present 
senior class of Princeton University have. The life is 
different, but the personality of the place is the same; 
it is the same place you have all loved, and praise God 
it shall always remain the same place. (Applause.) 

And so, gentlemen, I feel the spirit of all the ideals 
which we entertain for Princeton made greater, the 
effort made more confident to partake of such things as 
can never be conquered or lessened, when I come into 
contact with companies like this. I don’t know that 
I do you any good in going from gathering to gathering, 
but I certainly know that in coming I drink of the wine 
of the spirit which is the life of the place which I am 
entrusted to govern. (Applause.) We all intend the 
same thing, we all share the same thoughts, we all feel 
the same impulse, and that is the ground of our con- 
fidence as to the future. (Prolonged applause and 
cheers. ) 


REPORT ON THE SOCIAL COORDINATION 
OF THE UNIVERSITY 


SUBMITTED TO THE TRUSTEES OF PRINCETON UNIVER- 
SITY, JUNE I0, 1907. FROM THE ‘‘PRINCETON 
ALUMNI WEEKLY,” JUNE 12, 1907. 


WAct the December meeting of the Board of Trus- 
tees President Wilson submitted a report on the 
intellectual and social organization of the University, 
and a committee of seven members of the Board, with 
the President as Chairman, was appointed to consider 
the matter submitted and report thereon. At the Com- 
mencement meeting of the Trustees the committee so 
appointed brought in the following report, which was 
adopted by the Board: 


GENTLEMEN OF THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES: 


Your Committee, appointed to consider the recent 
report of the President of the University on the social 
conditions now affecting the academic spirit and intellec- 
tual growth of the University, have been led to believe 
that a great problem of reorganization confronts us 
whose immediate solution is necessary to the health and 
progress of Princeton both as a teaching body and as a 
social body. Moreover, radical as the processes of 
solution may prove to be, they are happy to believe 
that there never was a time when such processes could 
be undertaken with less fear of serious friction or fac- 
tious opposition. The social conditions to which we 
shall call your attention would no doubt have disclosed 
themselves in any case, but they are more emphasized 
in existing circumstances than they would otherwise 
have been, because of the contrast they present to recent 
changes in the University in other respects and the pe- 

499 


500 COLLEGE AND STATE 


culiar obstacles they put in the way of carrying our 
present plans to a satisfactory completion. Fortunately 
the recent innovations, because of the manifest improve- 
ment they have wrought, have put the whole university 
body in a wholesome humour of reform and have made 
all well-considered changes, devised and executed by 
frank common counsel, much easier of accomplishment. 
We have witnessed in the last few years the creation 
of a new Princeton, as the result,—the astonishingly 
prompt result,—of our attempt to give the University 
a vital, spontaneous intellectual life,—not a life of 
pedants and grinds or of youngsters held inexorably 
to formal tasks, but a life of young men led by many 
influences to read and think for themselves along great 
lines of study, emancipated from school methods and 
stimulated to use their minds outside the class room. 
We realized that, for all its subtle charm and beguiling 
air of academic distinction, Princeton, so far as her 
undergraduates were concerned, had come to be merely 
a delightful place of residence, where young men, for 
the most part happily occupied by other things, were 
made to perform certain academic tasks; that, although 
we demanded at stated times a certain part of the atten- 
tion of our pupils for intellectual things, their life and 
consciousness were for the rest wholly unacademic and 
detached from the interests which in theory were the 
all-important interests of the place. For a great ma- 
jority of them residence here meant a happy life of 
comradeship and sport interrupted by the grind of per- 
functory “‘lessons’’ and examinations, to which they at- 
tended rather because of the fear of being cut off from 
the life than because they were seriously engaged in 
getting the training which would fit their faculties and 
their spirits for the tasks of the world which they knew 
they must face after their happy freedom was over. 
Undoubtedly, if we would give Princeton the highest 
distinction and that academic leadership in the country 
which she may now so easily gain, we must study at 


COLLEGE AND STATE 501 


every turn the means by which to lift her intellectual 
life and achievements out of mediocrity not only, but 
also into such an order of naturalness and energy and 
distinction as shall make her by reason of her way of suc- 
cess a conspicuous model and example. There is no 
true intellectual life for the undergraduate in the mere 
faithful performance of s2t tasks, no matter how eagerly 
or with what concentration he devote himself to them, 
if between tasks his mind be emptied of the interest they 
have created and his life run entirely free of their in- 
fluence. [here must somehow be brought about an 
interpenetration of his experience inside the class room 
and conference and his experience outside academic ex- 
ercises, where men register their interests by what they 
do and say and let their minds have play upon. A 
college without sport and without a great deal of irre- 
sponsible boyish disengagement from serious talk and 
thoughtful effort no one can desire who understands 
the real economics and needs of the mind. The more 
wholesome sport and thoughtless fun the better both 
the work and the intimate comradeships upon which 
intellectual endeavor depends for energy and enlarge- 
ment. But leisure and study ought not to be separated 
in air-tight compartments. Leisure ought to be enriched 
and diversified by the interests which study creates. In 
the midst of play there ought to be a constant con- 
sciousness of what the place means and must be made 
to stand for,—a place of thoughtful, manly, disinter- 
ested men, disciples of university ideals. 

When we introduced the preceptorial system we made 
the greatest strategic move in that direction that has 
been made in the whole history of American universities. 
By it we meant to say that the intellectual life of a 
college did not consist of attendance upon class exer- 
cises or of preparation for recitations, but consisted, 
rather, of constant contact with study and the intimate 
association of teacher and pupil outside the class room, 
where the tradition of lectures and recitations was for- 


502 COLLEGE AND STATE 


gotten, rejected, and a thoroughly natural and human 
relationship, the relationship of fellow-students, sub- 
stituted. And that meaning has at once been made 
evident to the whole country. The contrast with the 
old order of things is most marked in the case of the 
intercourse of undergraduates with those preceptors 
who invite them often to their houses or who live in 
the same dormitories with them. A natural and easy 
social relationship, an informal, frequent exchange of 
calls, the easy, unconstrained talks of ordinary comrade- 
ship make study itself seem a thing natural and human, 
a thing not so much of formal exaction under rules as 
of the vital contact of minds. It is, by intention and 
in actual fact, a widening of the atmosphere of study to 
seem a natural medium of life and serious enjoyment. 

But the new process, vital as it is in itself, suited 
as it is to the object we have had in view, may be checked 
and even nullified by hostile or unfavorable influences. 
Our new methods of study require as their soil and indis- 
pensable environment a new social codrdination,—a 
co6rdination which will not only make sure of a constant 
and natural intercourse between teacher and pupil, but 
also knit the student body itself together in some truly 
organic way which will ensure vital intellectual and aca- 
demic contacts, the comradeships of a common life with 
common ends. Your Committee is of the opinion that 
this can best be done by combining the undergraduates 
in residential groups,—groups so made up that the forms 
and conditions under which each man in residence lives 
may so far as possible be the forms and conditions which 
are common to all. 

Princeton has not since the earliest years of her de- 
velopment been in any full sense a residential college. 
She provides her students with lodgings, but with noth- 
ing else; and not all of them with that. And even the 
buildings in which she lodges them have never as yet 
been drawn together into such geographical relations 
as might be expected to bring their occupants into 


COLLEGE AND STATE 503 


natural groups of association. ‘They form no closed 
units, suggesting intimate associations; there are no 
common rooms; lodgings are assigned by lot, and close 
neighbors may never know each other. Our social life 
for generations together has formed itself around the 
boarding house and club tables. Men have associated 
themselves with congenial groups of companions to 
eat together, and, when no sufficiently comfortable 
boarding house could be found, have rented or built 
quarters of their own in which they could command 
their own comforts and their own bill of fare in pleasing 
independence. 

The outcome in our own day has been the develop- 
ment of the upper-class clubs with their attractive club 
houses, in each of which there are not only dining rooms 
and kitchens and servants’ quarters, but also well- 
appointed common rooms, libraries, billiard rooms, 
smoking rooms, private dining rooms for parties, and 
sleeping rooms for visitors. ‘The members of the Fresh- 
man and Sophomore classes are not admitted to mem- 
bership in these clubs; but the Sophomores maintain 
clubs of their own upon a more simple scale in rented 
houses; and in providing, as we have recently provided, 
eating places for the Freshmen, instead of organizing 
a commons for the whole class, as economy and ordi- 
nary usage would have suggested, we have felt obliged 
to provide a large number of separate dining rooms in 
which they could distribute themselves in groups as 
inchoate clubs, and to set aside for each group which 
thus formed itself a separate common room in addition, 
to which the members of the group could resort after 
meals to smoke and spend a pleasant half hour of diver- 
sion together. And that is our social organization. 
The dormitories are mere sleeping places and places 
for study, or for the briefer social calls that break the 
busy hours of the evening. 

The evident peculiarity of this life is that it severs 
the social from the intellectual interests of the place, 


504 COLLEGE AND STATE 


and does not, with its scattered clubs and divided classes, 
make us up into a community even on the social side. 
The vital units are the club units. They divide all four 
classes into segments and sharply separate the classes 
as wholes from one another during the two earlier 
years of the undergraduate course, when characters 
are being formed and points of view established. 
Their organization is entirely outside university action; 
has no organic connection whatever with anything aca- 
demic; produces interests which absorb the attention 
and the energy of the best undergraduates as of all 
others, and yet nowhere interpenetrates the associations 
which arise out of study, carries no flavour with it which 
it might not as well have in any other town or in any 
other similar environment. 

It absorbs the attention and all the planning faculties 
of the undergraduates because all social ambitions turn 
upon it. It would be difficult to exaggerate the impor- 
tance in the life of the undergraduate of the question 
whether at the end of his Sophomore year he is going 
to be taken into one of the upper-class clubs. His 
thought is constantly fixed upon that object throughout 
the first two years of his university course with a great 
intensity and uneasiness whenever he thinks either of 
his social standing, his comradeships, or his general 
social consideration among his fellows. ‘The clubs do 
not take in all the members of the Junior and Senior 
classes. About one-third are left out in the elections; 
and their lot is little less than deplorable. They feel 
that they cannot continue to associate on terms of in- 
timacy with friends who have been elected into the clubs, 
for fear that they will be thought to be seeking to make 
favour with them and obtain a belated invitation to 
join; and, even when many of them as individuals are 
not disappointed at having been passed by, they must 
seek their comradeships with other classmates who are 
very much disappointed and who feel their isolation 
with a good deal of bitterness. It is dificult for them 


COLLEGE AND STATE 505 


to arrange for comfortable eating places; and the places 
at which they do board are only too much like caves 
of Adullam. They go forward to their graduation al- 
most like men who are in the University and yet not of 
it. Often they are cheerful and steadfast enough; indi- 
viduals here and there are sometimes quite indifferent 
to their comparative isolation, being absorbed in their 
books or in the task of earning the money necessary 
to pay their college expenses, but as a class their position 
is most trying, and most discreditable to our university 
democracy. It often happens that men who fail of elec- 
tion into one of the clubs at the end of the Sophomore 
year leave the University and go to some other college 
or abandon altogether the idea of completing their 
university course. 

There is a great deal of admirable solidarity still in 
our undergraduate life. The ‘Princeton Spirit” of 
which we so often speak, and which is so strong and 
excellent a force in everything that affects either the 
life or the fortunes of the University, has impelled the 
leading spirits among the undergraduates to strive with 
the utmost loyalty to keep the upper-class clubs from 
becoming factional centres and dividing the undergradu- 
ate body into cliques which would prefer the interests 
of their clubs to the interests of the University as a 
whole. They have felt that the upper-class clubs dif- 
fered very radically, and very much for the better, from 
the fraternities which have cut the undergraduate body 
of other colleges into segments and factions, because 
they include only Juniors and Seniors in their member- 
ship and leave the Sophomores and Freshmen undivided, 
to acquire the democratic habit and united feeling of 
the place. So soon as the practice threatened to grow 
up of seeking out attractive and especially desirable 
under-classmen and pledging them in advance to accept 
elections into particular upper-class clubs, a treaty of 
the most stringent character was entered into by the 
clubs which sought to make it an act of personal dis- 


506 COLLEGE AND STATE 


honour on the part of any upper-classman who was a 
member of a club even to cultivate relations of personal 
intimacy with under-classmen for fear such ends might 
be in view. ‘That treaty has again and again been vio- 
lated, and again and again renewed, in stricter and 
stricter form, until, in its present shape, as now pending 
for readoption, it practically seeks to fix an impassable 
gulf between the upper and lower classes in order that 
such attempts and suspicions may be altogether avoided. 

It even goes further. It attempts to minimize the 
personal and social intercourse between Sophomores 
and Freshmen, and so segregates the Sophomores en- 
tirely. Because the Sophomores, since they cannot be 
sought or solicited as prospective candidates for mem- 
bership in upper-class clubs, which are the natural goal 
of their social ambition, associate themselves in groups 
to seek admission—not openly or avowedly, but none 
the less systematically and effectively. That is the 
recognized object of the Sophomore clubs. It is equally 
well known, and indeed matter of course, that the 
groups of Freshmen who form their separate clubs in 
the several dining rooms in which the Freshmen now 
eat are formed with a view to being taken at the end 
of the year into the different Sophomore organizations 
or ‘“‘followings’’ (the so-called “‘hat lines’? described in 
the President’s report), and so making their way, in 
turn, into the upper-class clubs, where all roads of social 
preferment in the University end. The makers of the 
latest inter-club treaty endeavour, in the terms of the 
document they have just drawn up, to minimize and in 
part control that tendency also, by regulating in some 
degree the personal and social intercourse between 
Freshmen and Sophomores, over whom the clubs, the 
parties to the treaty, clearly have no jurisdiction what- 
ever. 

Two very significant and very undesirable, and even 
dangerous, things have thus come about: the two lower 
classes, who need above all things the forming and guid- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 507 


ing influence of the upper classes, have been almost com- 
pletely segregated, and the very influences which seemed 
to render their segregation necessary from the point 
of view of the clubmen have brought about the very 
result their segregation was meant to prevent,—that is, 
they have cut them up into groups and cliques whose 
social ambitions give them separate and rival inter- 
ests quite distinct from, plainly hostile to, the interests 
of the University as a whole. 

No one seems to expect such treaties to be kept. A 
majority will always respect and obey them, as laws 
to which they have voluntarily submitted themselves; 
but a minority will always break and ignore them,— 
with more or less indulgent condemnation from the ma- 
jority. For it is universally admitted that they are in 
restraint of human nature: that there is, of course, noth- 
ing intrinsically dishonourable in the desire of an upper- 
classman to secure some friend in the lower class for 
his own club, and that the natural rivalry of the upper- 
class clubs, at any rate for the picked men of the lower 
classes, will frequently lead individuals to break through 
the artificial restraints of the treaty, no matter what 
pledges are exacted of them or of their clubs as organ- 
izations. In brief, the social ambitions created by the 
existing system of club life are too strong for indi- 
vidual honour; and treaties in restraint of natural im- 
pulses, even if obeyed, do not prevent the social di- 
visions among the Freshmen and Sophomores which it 
is their main purpose to prevent. And all the while, 
treaties notwithstanding, the several groups formed by 
the Freshmen and Sophomores, if not in effect detached 
sections of the upper-class clubs, are at any rate their 
satellites and attend them most observantly. 

Along with the steadily increasing concentration of 
the attention of the undergraduates upon the social 
question and the centring of all social ambitions upon 
the upper-class clubs has gone a very noticeable, a very 
rapid, increase in the luxury of the upper-class club 


508 COLLEGE AND STATE 


houses. The two oldest clubs now have houses of 
extraordinary elegance and luxury of appointment and 
five other clubs are maturing plans for replacing their 
present comfortable structures with buildings which will 
rival the others in beauty, spaciousness, and comfort. 
The University, which gives life to these clubs and con- 
stitutes their ostensible raison d’éire, seems in danger 
of becoming, if the present tendencies of undergraduate 
organization are allowed to work out their logical re- 
sults, only an artistic setting and background for life 
on Prospect Avenue. ‘That life, as it becomes more 
and more elaborate, will become more and more absorb- 
ing, and university interests will fall more and more into 
the background. ‘The interest of the lower classes will 
more and more centre upon it and the energies of the 
upper classes will be more and more engrossed by it. 
The vital life of the place will be outside the Uni- 
versity and in large part independent of it. 

These tendencies have not been obvious until the last 
year or two. ‘Though for a long time apparent enough 
on close observation, they seemed until lately to be 
without formidable momentum and quite controllable 
by the conservative influences of the place. But now 
the undergraduates themselves clearly perceive them 
and are uneasily aware that they are rapidly getting 
beyond their control. Before the establishment of the 
preceptorial system, with its necessary corollary of the 
intimate association of teacher and pupil,—the codrdi- 
nation of the undergraduate life with the teaching of 
the University,—these things were not so near the 
heart of our plans and hopes for Princeton’s intellectual 
development and academic revitalization. But now they 
are of the essence of everything we are striving for, 
whether on the undergraduate or on the graduate side 
of the University’s work, and we are bound to con- 
sider the means by which to effect an immediate rein- 
tegration of our academic life. 

Your Committee is of the opinion that the only ade- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 509 


quate means of accomplishing this is the grouping of the 
undergraduates in residential quadrangles, each with its 
common dining hall, its common room for intercourse 
and diversion, and its resident master and preceptors; 
where members of all four of the classes shall be asso- 
ciated in a sort of family life, not merely as neighbors 
in the dormitories but also as comrades at meals and 
in many daily activities,—the upper classes ruling and 
forming the lower, and all in constant association with 
members of the Faculty fitted to act in sympathetic co- 
operation with them in the management of their com- 
mon life. In brief, your Committee is of the opinion 
that the only way in which the social life of the under- 
graduates can be prevented from fatally disordering, 
and perhaps even strangling, the academic life of the 
University is by the actual absorption of the social life 
into the academic. 

This is not the scheme of the nelish colleges. Those 
colleges have separate autonomy. Each separately un- 
dertakes the instruction of the undergraduates resident 
within it. The plan we propose involves only a con- 
venient residential division of the University as a social 
body. It does not involve its division, or the alteration 
of its past academic life, in any other respect whatever. 
It is a plan to substitute for the present segregation of 
the classes a reunion of the classes, and for the present 
division of the University into small social segments, 
which constantly tend to war with one another and to 
cut the University into factions, larger segments, or, 
rather, vital groups, which could not possibly develop 
like rivalries and cliques and which would be permeated 
by their very organization and environment by the so- 
berer influences of the place,—groups which would con- 
stitute the best possible media for the transmission of 
such impulses as we are now counting on to transform 
Princeton entirely. It is a choice between one sort of 
social transformation and another; and this is clearly 
the time when the choice must be made. 


510 COLLEGE AND STATE 


The effect of this plan upon the upper-class clubs 
would be either their abolition or their absorption. The 
withdrawal of the greater part of the Juniors and 
Seniors from the life of the proposed residential quads 
would of course be out of the question. A separate 
club life for them would rob the whole plan of its vi- 
tality, and is not to be thought of. But the history of 
the upper-class clubs has been most honourable and use- 
ful. They have served the University in a period of 
transition, when no plans were thought of for its codrdi- 
nation, as perhaps no other instrumentalities could have 
served it. Their abolition ought not to be thought of 
if their adaptation to the new order of things can be 
effected. It would be a violent breach of historical con- 
tinuity and out of tone with the traditions and standards 
of growth which have hitherto kept Princeton intact as 
an organic whole. Fortunately, if we should be happy 
enough to secure their codperation, it will be quite possi- 
ble to develop them into smaller residential quads as 
part of the University itself: and this, in the opinion 
of your Committee, would be the happiest possible solu- 
tion of the difficulty, giving to clubs which are now in 
danger of embarrassing and even profoundly demoraliz- 
ing the life of the University a réle of singular distinc- 
tion and public spirit in its organic development, and 
affording the country at large a new example of Prince- 
ton’s capacity to lead the way in matters of organiza- 
tion which are now puzzling the authorities of all our 
larger universities. We can lead in social example, 
as we are already leading in teaching example. And 
our alumni and undergraduates will,:as usual, be our 
partners in the enterprise. 

Your Committee, therefore, recommend that the 
President of the University be authorized to take such 
steps as may seem wisest for maturing this general plan, 
and for seeking the codperation and counsel of the up- 
per-class clubs in its elaboration; and that this Com- 
mittee be continued to consult with the President from 


COLLEGE AND STATE 511 


time to time as the matter may take shape and as he 
may require further counsel and advice, and to mature 
detailed plans for the future consideration of this Board 
so soon as such plans can be perfected by common coun- 
sel among all concerned. 
Respectfully submitted, 
Wooprow WILSON, Chairman. 


PRESIDENT WILSON’s ADDRESS TO THE BOARD OF 
‘TRUSTEES 


In presenting the above report, as chairman of the 
committee, President Wilson spoke, in substance, as 
follows: 

GENTLEMEN OF THE BoarD oF [TRuSTEES: I have 
never had occasion, I probably never shall have occa- 
sion, to lay a more important matter before you than 
the proposals contained in this report; and, full as that 
report is, I feel justified in detaining you to add some 
explanatory matter of my own. 

The plan outlined in the report is not of hasty or 
recent conception, and its object is not primarily a so- 
cial reorganization of the University. It is but part,— 
an indispensable part,—of the purpose we have stead- 
fastly set ourselves to accomplish, namely, the reorgani- 
zation and revitalization of the University as an aca- 
demic body, whose objects are not primarily social but 
intellectual, and whose characteristic work can be ac- 
complished only in organic fashion, without confusion 
of aims or of methods, and without regard to things 
which are immaterial to the main end in view. I have 
long foreseen the necessity of thus drawing the under- 
graduates together in genuinely residential groups in 
direct association with members of the Faculty, as an 
indispensable accompaniment and completion of the pre- 
ceptorial system and of all the other measures we have 
taken to quicken and mature the intellectual life of the 
University. 


512 COLLEGE AND STATE 


The upper-class clubs seem, in the report, to occupy 
the foreground of the entire picture, and to be some- 
how at the heart of the circumstances which render 
a social recodrdination of the University necessary; but 
that is only an accident of our development. What 
the report proposes would in any case be necessary. It 
is in itself the best and most thoroughly tested means 
of drawing the social and intellectual life of any col- 
lege together which desired to do the things it is our 
purpose and duty to do for Princeton. The clubs sim- 
ply happen to stand in the way. ‘They are not con- 
sciously doing anything to the detriment of the Uni- 
versity. Their spirit, on the contrary, has, throughout 
the greater part of their existence, been singularly fine. 
The thoughtful men in them have done everything in 
their power to prevent factional feeling in the Univer- 
sity and a too keen rivalry between the clubs; and the 
clubs have always been centres of the most loyal feeling 
for the University. But, in spite of their admirable 
spirit and of every watchful effort they have made to 
the contrary, and by a process which neither they nor 
we could successfully control, a system of social life has 
grown up in the University by reason of their existence 
which divides classes, creates artificial groups for social 
purposes, and renders a wholesome university spirit 
impossible. Circumstances created, not by design, but 
by the inevitable operation of human nature, render a 
radical reorganization of our life imperative, if the main 
ends for which that life is meant are to be attained. 

Intellectual and spiritual development, in the broad- 
est sense of those terms, are the chief and, indeed, the 
only legitimate aims of university life. Not that sport 
and social pleasure are to be excluded: they ought, on 
the contrary, to be given the keener zest by being made 
parts, the natural accompaniments, of a life that is 
deeply stimulating and interesting. But a university is 
first of all a place of study, a place in which to ac- 
quire a certain mastery in the use of the mind, in which 


COLLEGE AND STATE 513 


to throw off crudities and gain a habit of thoughtful 
comprehension which 1s very different from a knowledge 
of set “lessons” and a mastery of allotted tasks. This 
is our chief thought and ideal for Princeton; and if we 
can in any considerable degree realize it every other 
good thing will come in its train,—the companionships 
which stimulate and reward, the fun that clears the 
head and lightens the spirits, the zest of youth that is 
the true seed of real manhood. ‘These things come 
only when a university is made a real community; its 
companionships academic and steeped in the atmos- 
phere of a life so constituted as to feel all the deeper 
impulses of the place: a life in which teacher and pupil 
alike take a natural part on terms of spontaneous in- 
timacy, and in which there is constant matter-of-course 
contact between men young and old. Contacts of mind 
become the common accompaniment of social pleasure 
in such a community. Such is the purpose of the resi- 
dential quads; and there is the abundant proof of long 
experience that they will accomplish it. 

Under our present social organization there is a con- 
stant, even an increasing, disconnection between the life 
and the work of the University, between its companion- 
ships and its duties: there is an almost entire disconnec- 
tion of consciousness between its hours and its ideals 
of pleasure and its hours and ideals of work. The 
social activities of the place not only have no necessary 
connection with any of its serious tasks, but are, besides, 
exceedingly complex and absorbing; do in fact absorb 
the energies of the most active undergraduates in purely 
unacademic things. It has become common for Sopho- 
mores, as the end of the academic year approaches, to 
ask the advice of their instructors (now that there is 
some intimacy of counsel between them) as to which 
career they shall choose for the remainder of their 
course, the studious or the social, the life of the student 
or the life of the clubman,—and that not because there 
is in the clubs any cynical indifference to study but be- 


514 COLLEGE AND STATE 


cause the social activities into which their members are 
naturally and inevitably drawn are very many and very 
delightful and very engrossing, and study has to take 
its chance in competition with them. 

The last two years have seen influences of this kind 
increase in strength at an extraordinary rate, and gain 
a momentum which makes this the imperative time of 
action. It is clearly evident to anyone who lives in 
Princeton and intimately touches the life of the place 
that these influences are now cutting at the root of a 
thing upon which we depend for the maintenance of 
some of the best things in our custom and tradition. 
They are splitting classes into factions, and endanger- 
ing that class spirit upon which we depend for our self- 
government and for the transmission of most of the 
loyal impulses of the University. The ‘‘politics” of 
candidacy for membership in the upper-class clubs not 
only produce a constant and very demoralizing distrac- 
tion from university duties in Freshman and Sophomore 
years and enforce all sorts of questionable customs, 
putting the sanction of habit upon many understandings 
which seriously hamper the freedom and the personal 
development of lads who have good stuff of initiative 
in them: they cut deeper even than that. Group rival- 
ries break the solidarity of the classes. The younger 
classes are at no point made conscious of the interests 
of the University: their whole thought is concentrated 
upon individual ambitions, upon means of preference, 
upon combinations to obtain selfish individual ends, and 
the welfare of the University, as against any particu- 
lar bad custom which will serve that purpose, is ig- 
nored, labour as the upper classmen may to point it 
out and enforce it. Not only do men in all classes feel 
that too great absorption in study will involve a virtual 
disqualification for social preferment; they also feel 
that the chief objects of their happiness and their ambi- 
tion are connected with their social affiliations, not with 
the general interests of the University. They strive 


COLLEGE AND STATE 515 


against this, when they become Juniors and Seniors, 
but they do not strive against it successfully; and when 
they are Freshmen and Sophomores they do not strive 
against it at all. Men who enter the University after 
Freshman year are generally thrown out of the running 
altogether and find themselves in the upper years iso- 
lated and lonely, to the still further weakening of the 
old-time class solidarity. If for nothing else than to 
keep the classes undivided in spirit, the new quad di- 
visions would be preferable to the present club di- 
visions. [he present system of our life is artificial and 
unwholesome. Individuals and classes alike must be re- 
stored to that feeling of intimate and constant connec- 
tion with the University as the University, as an organic, 
indivisible thing, their home and their atmosphere, upon 
which Princeton’s strength and prestige depend. 

The facts are disputed by no one who knows our 
undergraduate life as it is now constituted. It is by 
common consent threatened with the loss of college feel- 
ing and of class feeling and it is entirely disconnected 
from the intellectual purposes of the place in its aims 
and organization. Debate turns, not upon the facts, 
but only upon the means and methods of reorganiza- 
tion. The finest evidence of the spirit of Princeton 
seems to me to lie in the fact that the undergraduates 
themselves have, during the past year, come to recog- 
nize the situation in all its significance and to wish 
for an entire emancipation from it, by no matter how 
radical a remedy. The things they have foreseen and 
dreaded and tried to stave off have come upon them, 
and they are ready to accept any thoroughgoing reform. 

The remedy proposed by the committee whose report 
I have read is radical, indeed, but not wholly out of 
line with the organization it is meant to replace. The 
associations formed in the quads will be like the asso- 
ciations formed in the clubs; with the elective princi- 
ple left out, indeed, but with all the opportunities for 
a natural selection of chums and companions that the 


516 COLLEGE AND STATE 


larger number in residence will afford; and with an 
added dignity of association, under resident members 
of the Faculty, fitted for the association and for the 
function of leadership and example which will naturally 
fall to them. ‘The elective principle in the clubs at pres- 
ent amounts to little more than the right to choose 
groups of men (artificially enough formed, as every- 
body knows) rather than individuals. And, whether 
the new plan is like the old or not, it is not the social 
side that our thought is dwelling on. We are not 
seeking to form better clubs, but academic communities. 
We are making a university, not devising a method of 
social pleasure. ‘The social life of the quads will be 
all-inclusive, and it will serve as the medium for things 
intellectual. 

The question, How the transition from our present 
social organization to the new organization is to be 
effected,—-with what adjustments, accommodations, 
measures of transformation,—is now our main subject 
of debate; and we can enter on that debate with a 
frankness and confidence in each other which I believe 
no other university in the world could hope for in an 
undertaking of such delicacy and magnitude. We have 
a body of alumni for whom the interests of the Uni- 
versity as a whole, as they may be made to see those 
interests at any moment of action, take precedence over 
every other consideration, and over every rival senti- 
ment. They are ready to be partners with the under- 
graduates and ourselves in accomplishing anything that 
may be necessary to give free and wholesome vigour to 
the life of the University and to secure to her the fame 
which she covets and must win,—the fame of distinct 
intellectual purpose and a clear knowledge of the means 
by which she proposes to attain them. 

I take leave to say that Princeton is the only univer- 
sity in the country which has found itself, which has 
formulated a clear ideal and deliberately set about the 
synthesis of plan necessary to realize it. She has set 


COLLEGE AND STATE 517 


the country an example in the methods of teaching nec- 
essary to give a great university the intimacy of con- 
tact and the direct efficiency of instruction hitherto sup- 
posed to belong only to the small college, and suited 
to create, besides, something which the small college 
has seldom known how to create,—a habit and freedom 
of independent reading which makes a “‘course’’ some- 
thing more than the instruction of a single classroom 
or a single instructor; and now she must take the next 
step. She must organize her life in such a way that 
these contacts between the university and the student 
shall be stuff of daily habit, and not merely matters of 
formal appointment; not a thing of the classroom and 
conference merely, but a thing which may touch every 
hour, any hour, of the day, and fill seasons of leisure 
and enjoyment with a consciousness of what it is that 
vitalizes a university and makes it a force in the life 
of a great nation. Common counsel shall bring us to 
this consummation,—not without trouble, but without 
serious conflict of opinion or purpose, as a new exhibi- 
tion of what love of Princeton can do for her regen- 
eration when her sons set themselves to the task. ‘The 
labour will be pleasant, and the abiding fame of it will 
belong to all of us in common. 


In order to complete the record of Commencement 
with regard to this important matter, we add the mem- 
orandum which Dr. Wilson sent to the presidents of 
the several upper-class clubs, in order to afford them 
an opportunity to discuss the project at their annual 
banquets, if they chose to do so, in a form which would 
be exact and not made up out of oral report. This 
memorandum, he gave it to be understood, emanated 
only from him individually and did not when it was 
issued rest upon any action of the Board of Trustees. 
Since he sent it out the Trustees have adopted the es- 
sential idea and purpose of the plan. The details em- 


518 COLLEGE AND STATE 


bodied in the memorandum remain President Wilson’s 
individual suggestions. 


MEMORANDUM CONCERNING RESIDENTIAL QUADS. 


I am very glad indeed to have an opportunity to ex- 
plain a plan which, though certainly radical in character, 
can easily be so misunderstood as to seem much more 
radical than it is. It is a scheme I have long had in 
mind as a necessary means of giving Princeton not only 
social but also academic coérdination and of making her 
new methods of study a vital part of her undergradu- 
atenites 

The plan in its briefest terms is this: to draw the 
undergraduates together into residential quads in which 
they shall eat as well as lodge together, and in which 
they shall, under the presidency of a resident member 
of the Faculty, regulate their own corporate life by 
some simple method of self-government. For this pur- 
pose it would be necessary to place all future dormitories 
in such relation to those already erected as to form 
close geographical units, and to erect in connection with 
each group a building which should contain a dining 
room, kitchens and serving rooms, a handsome com- 
mon room for social purposes, and rooms for the mem- 
ber of the Faculty who shall preside in the quad. Every 
undergraduate would be required actually to live in his 
quad—that is, to take his meals there as well as lodge 
there; and the residents of each quad would be made 
up as nearly as might be of equal numbers of Seniors, 
Juniors, Sophomores, and Freshmen: because it is clear 
to every one that the life of the University can be best 
regulated and developed only when the under-classmen 
are in constant association with upper-classmen upon 
such terms as to be formed and guided by them. The 
self-zovernment of each group would naturally be vested 
in the Seniors, or in the Seniors and Juniors, who were 
members of the quad. 


COLLEGE AND STATE 519 


The objects of this arrangement would be: (1) To 
place unmarried members of the Faculty in residence in 
the quads in order to bring them into close, habitual, 
natural association with the undergraduates and so inti- 
mately tie the intellectual and social life of the place into 
one another; (2) to associate the four classes in a genu- 
inely organic manner and make of the University a real 
social body, to the exclusion of cliques and separate class 
social organizations; (3) to give to the University 
the kind of common consciousness which apparently 
comes from the closer sorts of social contact, to be had 
only outside the classroom, and most easily to be got 
about a common table, and in the contacts of a com- 
mon life. 

This plan directly affects the upper-class clubs be- 
cause, under it, it would be necessary to keep the most 
influential and efficient Seniors and Juniors in residence 
in the quads for their government and direction. It 
would be clearly out of the question to let them eat 
elsewhere and find their chief interests elsewhere, leav- 
ing the quads to Freshmen and Sophomores and a mi- 
nority of upper-classmen who would be too few to play 
any true part of influence or control. ‘The adoption of 
the plan would obviously make it necessary that the 
clubs should allow themselves to be absorbed into the 
University, by the natural process of becoming them- 
selves residential quads, and so retaining their his- 
torical identity at the same time that they showed their 
devotion to the University by an act of supreme self- 
sacrifice. JI cannot imagine a service to the University 
which would bring more distinction, more éclat through- 
out the entire university world, or which would give to 
our present clubs a position of greater interest and im- 
portance in the history of academic life in America. 

The details of the adjustments which would be nec- 
essary I have in large part thought out; but I do not 
wish to dwell upon them now, simply because I wish 
them to be subject to change in my own mind. These 


520 COLLEGE AND STATE 


complicated things cannot be wisely planned or executed 
except by the slow processes of common counsel; and 
I should wish the details of such a scheme of trans- 
formation to be worked out by the frank conference of 
all concerned. 

But some things seem to me clear. I should hope 
that, in effecting the transition, each club would vest 
its property in the hands of a small board of trustees 
of its own choice who should be charged with adminis- 
tering it for the benefit of the University in association 
with the present university authorities; and that that 
board should have important powers of advice or con- 
firmation in respect of the appointment of resident 
members of the Faculty and the regulations governing 
the assignment of students to the quad under its super- 
vision, and with regard to all matters upon which they 
could retain a hold without embarrassing the uniform 
government of the University as a whole or the supreme 
authority of the Trustees of the University itself. And 
I see no reason why the graduate members of the sev- 
eral clubs might not retain all the privileges they now 
enjoy in respect of the use of the club property and 
meals at the club tables on their visits to Princeton. I 
see no reason why they should ever feel their relations 
to the clubs at all radically altered because the clubs 
had in effect become residential colleges. 

Moreover, I should hope that it would be borne in 
mind that this scheme of social and academic coérdina- 
tion, which present conditions in the University seem 
to render imperatively necessary, is not a plan to prevent 
club life in Princeton. Club life is based upon social 
instincts and principles which it would be impossible to 
eradicate. But these natural instincts and tendencies 
would, under the new order of things, undoubtedly ex- 
press themselves in a different way, a much better way 
than at present,—as they express themselves wherever 
men of congenial tastes find themselves in need of re- 
laxation. Probably clubs of an entirely different char- 


COLLEGE AND STATE 521 


acter, not residential, but purely social organizations, 
would from time to time spring up; and I do not think 
that the university authorities would be jealous of that, 
provided such associations were sharply separated both 
in form and in tradition from the processes which have 
given us our present social strifes, perplexities, and di- 
visions. No one can now predict just how the new de- 
velopments would come or just what shapes they would 
take. 


END OF VOLUME ONE 


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